Will there be enough work in the future? Opinions are fairly divided between those who believe that technology advances will reduce human jobs, and those who believe that technology advances will produce as many jobs as they displace. It’s easier to predict the jobs that will be automated away by technology, but much more difficult to predict the new jobs that these same technologies will create. In the end, we don’t really know.
In December of 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute published Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transition in a Time for Automation, a report that directly addresses this question. The McKinsey study examined in great detail the work that’s likely to be displaced by automation through 2030, as well as the jobs that are likely to be created over the same period. It analyzed data from 46 countries comprising almost 90 percent of global GDP, focusing particularly on six countries: China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico and the US. For each of this six countries, the study modeled the potential for employment changes in more than 800 occupations based on different scenarios for the pace of automation adoption and for future labor demand.
The report’s overall conclusion is that a growing technology-based economy will create a significant number of new occupations, - as has been the case in the past, - which will more than offset declines in occupations displaced by automation. However, “while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging - matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.”
Via Miloš Bajčetić