Be prepared to be shocked. Over the next 20 years, the US will lose 50% of its workforce to automation. Think about it, says Philip Letts, CEO, of blur Group. Every other job will be taken by a robot.
At least that’s what experts like Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist, and Michael A. Osborne, an associate professor of machine learning, at the University of Oxford predict.
Their gloomy forecast is based on some pretty sound criteria. Computing power is doubling every 18 months, machines are getting smarter and humans getting ever more canny in their search for the uber-efficient business model. It’s already started to happen. Big enterprises like IBM and Coca Cola are taking the grim reaper’s scythe to jobs on a colossal scale in the face of tough trading conditions and the introduction of new technologies.
So what will the world look like with half of us technically unemployed? I believe there will be a huge cultural shift towards society and spiritualism. With work no longer centre stage in our life plans, the focus will move towards making the world a better place in which to spend all our new-found free time. Volunteering will be huge with massive social enterprises formed to tackle issues like poverty and crime. The State will re-assert itself as a wealth creator, heavily taxing the hugely profitable automated businesses to fund education and social enterprise.
A new class system will evolve: a true working class and a new thinking class whose work-less world will be filled with learning and solving social and environmental issues. The thinking class will be paid through state grants based on societal contribution. Perhaps apartheid will return as tension between the two classes grows. Workers only bars will emerge, open only to those with good old fashioned jobs. The thinkers will form an intelligent underclass meeting in private clubs…
OK, I may have been carried away on an Orwellian flight of fancy, but as Jon Cruddas the policy review chief of the UK’s Labour Party, says: “The challenges we face are big, but our politics are small.”
As for my view, I think the death of work has been exaggerated and that for every two jobs lost, a new one will be found. The new work will be highly creative and hugely cerebral and may well come from social enterprises. I genuinely think that the world will be a better place if less time was spent on working, and more on living.
The author of this blog is Philip Letts, CEO, blur Group, www.blurgroup.com
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