Yes, the research is clear that jobs which involve a lot of “routine” and “predictable” tasks remain particularly susceptible to getting replaced by robots. Cushioning the impact for those affected and helping them reskill are immediate challenges.
But, as Harvard economist David Deming says, “it has proven devilishly difficult to program a machine for even a short, unstructured conversation with a human being, much less to engage in the kind of flexible teamwork that is increasingly needed in the modern economy.” There will always be a demand for the human touch, and this demand has already grown in recent years.
Research has shown, for example, how jobs requiring social skills have grown twice as fast as those requiring maths skills over the past 30 years in the United States. The real predicted growth, however, is in roles that combine “hard” technical and “soft” interpersonal skills, like doctors, engineers, or computer scientists working in group settings. Big data analysis of job advertisements in New Zealand supports this finding, showing that the kinds of jobs set to grow here involve these complementary skillsets.
The time is right to reshape our education, training and development systems accordingly. One opportunity here is to promote the ailing liberal arts and humanities alongside STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. Another is to further support parenting and programmes that lay the foundation for these skills in the early years, when young brains are at their most malleable.
Humans have been underrated when it comes to the future of work. We need not view the future as a threat — with nightmarish visions of machines causing mass unemployment — but rather one of opportunity: where jobs of the future harness the complementary strengths of humans and technology. We must, as Andreas Schleicher from the OECD puts it, forget about developing “second-class robots” and focus more on “first-class humans”.
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