The future of jobs

The onrushing wave


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Actually the athletic trainers (shown as secure in one of the tables) will lose their jobs as new gadgets that sense the humans' vitals and calculate according to goals set. This is already happening.

DG Reid

All life competes. What do you do about those who lose? Give them a trophy anyway? Technology will change who wins and loses, but if your goal is to set a minimum prosperity for everyone, it can only be done by taking money away from the winners and this will eventually destroy society completely, but not today, so on with it. Technology is not the problem. Politics is the problem.


In the January 18 issue you deplore "a mismatch between what education systems provide and what employers need." The piece goes on to tout apprenticeships, sponsorship by firms of their future hires' education, and input from those firms into the design of courses.

But why pay as much as $50,000 per year for instruction, however relevant? College graduates eagerly seek out unpaid summer internships to learn what their degree programs fail to teach them. Rather than wasting four years in classrooms, it would be better to spend a year or even two getting on-the-job training as interns. The only problem is the "unpaid" part.

The answer is to permit young workers in extended internships to borrow the money they need to support themselves on the same terms college students get: low interest rates, with no repayment required until they start receiving adequate salaries.

schwartzberg in reply to donnolo

hi donnolo,
i am on the latter half of my cooperate working life.
I found your Response interesting.
The effectiveness or use of education is hard to measure. It hard to generalize about the Substitution value of a year's internship with one year of University education. Doing macro economics with education as with unemployment or GDP statistics might be possible, in which case as you write, substituting an internship with a year might be better for industry.

Though for the individual, an internship, might involve an unpaid or mindless wait of time (or bothe) (a lot of this is Happening at the Moment in Spain). Or it might be as edifying (even though poorly paid) as a years education (in Germany). Paying 50,000 for a year's (hopefully good) tuition, might offer personal stimulation, and the degree is likely to open doors (UK and the USA) ...


In what is a very thoughtful article, the Economist nonetheless tilts towards a rather Darwinian view of economic progress, abstracted from any political associations and wholly untethered to any moorings in morality or the common good.

While the article does some lip service to the notion that all may benefit from technological progress under certain circumstances, it envisions a world in which intelligent and propertied upper classes continue to derive the lion's share of the wealth by ever-larger deployment of capital over labor to the execution of their economic interests.

But this ignores reality !

For it is precisely the politics of man and the public good which drives all economic progress, not nearly the private and selfish interests of the moneyed classes.

In this vein, it is rather queer, that the majority of the electorate in most Western nations in the past 30 years have voted against their own interests to lower effective tax rates on the rich to the point where, at times, the boss will pay nothing on his millions, whilst his secretary will pay half or more of her salary in taxes.

The key to this paradoxical situation is the mesmerizing of the masses through modern political advertising, which has convinced the plebian man that he, too, can be a member of the erudite and moneyed classes, merely by lowering taxes on the rich!

Unfortunately for the masses, this boondoggling pabalum has held sway for too long, combined as it has been with a vast, anti-government conspiracy that has sought to diminish and destroy centralized political power.

The reality is that the rich are very good at their game of extracting wealth from the labor of others and, then, hoarding that wealth. It is well-known that the rich spend a very tiny sum on their own personal consumption, preferring instead to save the rest and put it to use, seeking rents. Because of this, the key to resolving the terrible iniquities that result from laissez-faire capitalism is to TAX THE RICH VERY PROGRESSIVELY, especially, to tax accumulated wealth, rather than just income.

Now, the rich will claim that this will destroy their incentives to be productive and to start up new businesses and, so, they claim, that there will be fewer jobs and greater economic despair, if their taxes are raised. But history disproves this pabulum: During the period from 1933 to 1983, when marginal tax rates in the US were as high as 90%, from time to time, the US economy expanded dramatically, the rich got a bit richer, but the lower and middle classes got richer appreciably faster than the rich, and a great society was created.

What happened to put an end to that great success and to bring about the stagnation of American society were the combined upheavals of the Viet Nam War, the Arab oil shocks, the resulting stagflation of the 1970s, and the choking off of any further rise in worker productivity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The world was just beginning to globalize at that point, and the world's monetary system was undergoing vast upheaval. The doors to China and India had not yet been opened, with all the deflationary pressure that such would later entail.

Many conservative economists will look at Reagan's lowering of taxes on the rich as the necessary precondition for the expansion of the 1980s, but they then miss the fact that Reagan, despite having avowed the opposite, actually led the largest Keynesian experiment then-do-date that the world had ever known, where he opened the flood gates and increased the size of the US Federal Debt from 800 billion when he took office to over 4 trillion when left office, just 8 years later, an approximate 20% annualized increase in the debt!! No other American president has increased the national debt at such a rapid pace, ever !!

The reason that capital has done so well in the last 30 years is because of this boondoggle begun by Reagan and Thatcher. It's high time that we turned the tide back and raised taxes on the rich to right this wrong!!

For the good of the world's nations, it's right and just that the rich be let to make lots of money, but that their taxes be raised such that the resulting inequality be smoothed out by income transfers from the rich to the poor and the middle classes. This can be done in any number of ways, through public works projects, income support to the lower classes, tax relief for the lower classes, and so on. But truth be told, it must be done. Reagan was wrong: Government is not the problem. Government is an essential part of the solution !

If we want to know why the incomes of the middle and lower classes have stagnated in the past 30 years, we need look no further than to those tax policies will have taxed capital at a much lower rate than labor, and which have favored rent-seeking over every other economic activity. Time for a change !


I witnessed this chilling technology cannibalism some 12 years ago when an IT worker whom I was a "lead" over was tapped to be a victim of a RIF (Reduction in Force) by someone 2 management levels above me (without requesting any prior feedback from my boss or I as to the impact of losing her).
Within a week, two people from an 'internal automation' group appeared at my cube to seek my help in composing a Requirements Document to code and then time-initiate the vendor performance reports the RIF'd victim produced each day. Her former output was automated in 3 months' time. She became a letter carrier for the postal service enjoying a natural fit for her gregarious personality. I managed to stay one step ahead of the automation grim reaper for another decade before jumping at an early retirement offer, something like an honorable discharge.


And that in a nutshell is why I encouraged my husband to switch careers and get out of corporate finance recruiting last year. I told him he'd be obsolete sooner than later. I'm a one-person marketing team at a software company bringing in marketing automation software for 'my team' in north america but the UK HQ is hesitant to bring it on yet as it could replace half the team over there. Que Sera, Sera....

Joshua Cogliati

Misc comments:

1. Top up the wages, as described as a possible solution in the leader, would increase the prevalence of stultifying BS jobs, because that would allow there to be an increasing difference between what the job is worth and what the pay is.

2. The existence of a reservation wage means that even if humans do have comparative advantage by having different skills than technology/robots/AI, it still might not make sense to trade because the wage would be below the reservation wage.

3. "Will there be ... [human] soldiers?" is one of the more relevant questions in the article. It is worth noting that remote controlled or semi-autonomous killer robots allow very small numbers of humans or other sentient beings to have a viable threat to kill large numbers of humans (as has been pointed out by Daniel Suarez and probably others). Revolution against such a drone equipped adversary might be effectively impossible. An important corollary is that unless the cybersecurity on the drones is perfect, the nominal owner of them may one day discover that they are dead wrong.

It is also worth considering that humans are currently in a symbiotic relationship with technology and that most technology is dependent on humans. Humans gain from our relationship with technology, and technology is able to continue to exist because of human inputs. Most current technology would cease to exist without humans (exceptions including things like human modified plants and animals). However, humans are in the loop less and less as more automation occurs. At some point, machine technology will no longer need humans, at which point we no longer have the power of pulling the plug by mere inaction.

Angus Cunningham


Whoever wrote this article clearly suspects strongly that 'it will' NOT 'so prove'. As everyone who can think straight for a few minutes knows, economies in the developed world have become idiotic. Some people work too hard and ruin family life; others appear marginalized out of economic life and have chaotic family life; innovation is producing either wealth or poverty but not well-being; and social polarizations are growing alarmingly.

Elsewhere TE has written of the ethical practices of the chief executives of France and the United States, and for a few years it has lobbed grenades at dishonest practices in the financial industry. Clearly the share of national incomes going to educate people in ethics that promote and assure social well-being through just problem-solving in the economy, must increase in both quantity and quality.

The ethics that Authentix Coaches bring to all our relationships and engagements with organizational clients are rooted in the following eight value disciplines:

Honesty: The discipline of avoiding either inaccuracy or deception and of being reciprocally open about intents and evolving intentions

Verbal Integrity: The discipline of being true to one’s word, or promptly honest in warning of exceptions arising because one was unable to anticipate intervening circumstances

Empathy: The disciplines of (a) being actively present to listen to the needs, wants, desires, preferences, and interests of others in one’s family, client, team, prospect, community, organization, culture and world and (b) anticipating accurately the sensitivities likely to be excited by one’s interest/want/need to share (or hide) potentially painful or disturbing data, hypotheses, expectations, or possibilities with such people

Accuracy: The discipline of caring enough about the communication of data, observations, facts, hypotheses, findings, questions, observations, assertions,
feelings, needs, requests, and recommendations both to avoid misdirection and to engender mutual trust that the goals of the team/organization are being respected intelligently

Clarity: The discipline of making sure that a message, either outgoing or incoming, has been understood before concluding that a communication cycle is satisfactorily complete

Courage: The discipline of (1) either asserting or forbearing when seemingly idiotic convention supports the opposite, and (2) either accepting responsibility
for a job, project, engagement, contract, person, team, organization, or community, or articulating honestly and accurately one’s reasons for declining to accept it – but only after carefully ascertaining that one is doing neither out of either bravado or egotistical desire for acclamation

Discretion: The discipline of making faithfully practical protection, or properly authorized recognition, of the proper ownership of valuable or sensitive information

Coherence: The discipline of (1) searching for, and either eliminating or explaining, the paradoxes underlying one’s own behaviour, assumptions and
aims and (2) gently helping others to do the same.

These eight values, when discussed seriously and serially through focused conversations involving either owners or employees, or both, have the simultaneous effect of (1) "injecting" real (rather than only financial) prosperity-creating capacity into organizations and (2) modeling well-being for individuals. Tested in enterprises of up to 50 employees, Authentix Coaches
see no reason to anticipate any limit in their applicability to larger organizations -- so long as the CEO has interest in the establishment or refinement of an intelligently structured set of sustaining and sustainable corporate values.

Eye-Zen English is a comprehensive set of principles for language usage that facilitates the installation of these eight values as a base to which other values more specifically related to the economic furrow an organization is ploughing may be added.


As our world becomes more technologically advanced, we must look at the competitive advantages of humans. Our advantages will not be manual labor, memory-intensive tasks or repetitive tasks. Our competitive advantages will be in three very human centered areas: caring for people, directing automation and imagining the next frontier.
(1)Caring for people – humans will continue to hold a strong competitive advantage for roles such as counseling, mentoring, interacting with the elderly or disabled, and caring for the sick. The challenge may be adjusting our society to accept that these are worthwhile pursuits that deserve higher compensation for the value given to our society – capitalism will not value these appropriately.
(2)Directing Automation -- we will also continue to have a competitive advantage in teaching computers and robots HOW to do things – humans will be better at identifying new needs or areas for improvement. As this type of automation gets more refined, we will also benefit from more consistent and safer processes, including driving automation.
(3)Imagining the next frontier – we humans think of some pretty crazy things…but some of those ideas are exactly what move our world forward. Humans will continue to hold a competitive advantage in imagination in all fields and automation will continue to trail just a bit behind.
Yes, this suggests that we would end up with many more people working in human services and health care, but if our world really becomes so advanced that we no longer need to spend a huge percentage of our time in the fields or factories, we can focus more time and attention on health and social well-being so we could extend the lives and quality of life for everyone.

Alan O Neill

So much in this article and in the comments. The economic cycle is another factor to be included in the future expectation for capitalism. By 2030 the world economy will have started to build towards the next boom peak around 2046 followed by the next great crash in or around 2048. It's important that our grandchildren don't get confused and think that this means that Keynes was totally right. He is mostly right as quoted in the article but we also need to pass on the skill to manage the extremes of boom/bust cycles in order to avoid such severe crashes and recessions like we are suffering now. This means boring financial management like Germany or Sweden practices. No fun for the big financial gamblers but safer for the rest of us. Very soon the concept of enough needs to be adopted worldwide; that we have enough of everything and enough babies, combined with allowing people enough to spend are the three essential realisations. This will change capitalism as a limit to population means a limit to profits and consumerism. Having all that we need means that we will have to be encouraged to buy less tangible things such as services, entertainments and occupations (things to occupy our attention) than we do already. The amount of war in the world at present may be a manifestation of the profit-makers realisation that there is very little money in peace now that most people have enough and that by destroying many parts of the world there will be more opportunities for investment in rebuilding etc..


In the 80s as a PhD student in Systems Science the big topic was "Expert Systems" but the technology had not caught up with the dream. It now has and it appears possible to transform our Health Care to a visit to a lab where blood/urine/fecal/hair samples, X-rays, MRI, etc will be submitted to be read by a computer that will generate a diagnosis and treatment protocol. Doctors will probably "evolve" into a low probability of replacement career much like dentists, cited on the chart in this article, who do strictly hands on procedures.

Angus Cunningham in reply to Poosta

Health care is not merely a matter of diagnostic analysis and prescription, tasks which could become an automatable expert system. If that were so, placebos would be without effect. They do have effects, sometimes remarkably positive ones, and the reasons they do must have something to do with the quality of a certain human relationships, something that can never be reliably delegated to an automatic expert system.


The pattern of constantly evolving technology,wage slavery for the majority and wealth for a few was established early in the Industrial revolution but persists into the modern post industrial globalised economy.The relationships between capital and labour, government and governed continue into a world totally different from 18th century revolutionary America and 19th century revolutionary militaristic Europe.
The new challenges from an economic system in which manual labour is largely unnecessary and little creative or cognitive input is required whilst population reaches 7 billion plus and all aspire to education, comfort and security is promising to render previous patterns of governance and control ineffective and largely irrelevant.
What then takes their place is what we must now focus on. Will we create a system of reasonable fairness and equality,material plenty and social harmony or have something else forced upon us.

Alex Wright


Only if it is possible for people to earn an income they can live off doing such things in the "brave new world", or it is topped up by social security or a basic income.

Even if the cost of rent or land plummets in such a future and food is available to even the destitute in the West (as, with food banks and soup kitchens, it usually is - at least to the able bodied), they will still need some way of earning income simply to pay for shelter (which at present requires British workers on minimum wage to toil from anything from 14 to 25 hours or more a week simply to earn the rent for a room).

rafael tavares

A very good job this report. I do not believe that journalists have a very high probability of losing their jobs to computerisation. Be happy. The artist that has drawn the picture of the onrushing wave is not familiar with surfing though. The action of surfing does not happen on top the wave as has been pictured but ahead of it and the surfer's skill consists of avoiding that the wave smashes him while riding its forward push. The panicked job-seekers fleeing the onrushing wave should have been rather pictured as job-market flotsam suddenly building up the monster wave itself. And the surfer - an aptly clad top 1% - deftly working for his survival (according to the wave size the top 1% will stand no chance, I tell you). Onshore the artist could have pictured a baffled bunch of occupy-wallstreeters and regulators beside an intent Paul Krugman. Anyway, don't sack the artist. Pay him an educational trip to Hawaii so he learns more of the surfing trade.


I am reminded of a joke which says that the factory of the (near) future will have only two full-time on-site employees: a man and a dog. The man is there to feed and clean up after the dog. The dog is there to bite any one who tries to touch the robots.


"Recreational therapist"? Is that a euphemism for a sex worker? I would think that the oldest profession would be hard to automate, but I have found that some mechanization does boost "quality" and "productivity".


"Hence the demise of production-line jobs and some sorts of book-keeping, lost to the robot and the spreadsheet" > who's going to debug the formulas and later reconcile the values entered into the spreadsheet if not a book-keeper? #spreadsheethell

oarhead in reply to greg_not_so

Accountants and/or programmers will be needed to write and update programs to crunch numbers, but how many of them. I used to turn my construction company's bills, receipts and man-hours in to a book keeper once a week but now just enter them in QuickBooks and e-mail payroll and quarterly statements to a payroll processor and my CPA who, in turn, probably use a completely automated system to process them. If I wasn't so frightened by the ever increasing complexity of the tax code and the legal consequences of a mistake. I would consider cutting them out of the loop too. However, I think that we can rely on our representatives, so many of whom come from or are funded by, the legal and financial industries, to keep things complicated for a long time to come. God forbid that they should legislate themselves or their backers out of a job.

AndreaAE in reply to oarhead

Standard accounting and bookkeeping may lend themselves to automation, but navigating the tax code labyrinth and minimizing tax liability are another story entirely. Not there yet.


The most pressing problem resulting from this: Underconsumption. If income goes to fewer and fewer people (i.e. capitalists) who will have the money to buy the goods and services created by these few owners. Thus, this situation will hurt capital as well as labor.

Stale Canole in reply to rolpol

This will be the ultimate paradox for future owners of capital. the 1% will continue to own and control more of the capital, but their customers spending power will erode at a similar pace. How they choose to handle that situation will likely define the policies that governments implement.

Let's hope it's not as selfish an approach as we're seeing now from them.



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