I want to give you a good and a bad news at the same time. First comes the good news. You don't need to be scared of your nerdy colleague who is sitting right in front of you with his thick eye glasses. He is NO MORE your competitor. In other words, his skills are being replaced with respect to time. But the bad news is NOW you have to compete with another thing which is the technology. Yes the smartphone you are carrying in your pant pockets, the laptop hanging on your back, the copy machine right next to you and the printer all of them are gonna eat away your job and not only yours but also your competitors, your partners, colleagues everybody's. So this is the age when human doesn't need to be afraid of each other. The machine that the men created by himself is going to eat them.
The statistics provide us thought-provoking findings. At the time of ever increasing productivity, Brynjolfsson & McAfee (2012) tell us that between May 2007 to October 2009, the unemployment jumped by more than 5.7 which is the largest ever increase in the postwar period. During late 1960's, in the vogue of ever increasing technology, some economists and political scientists "foresaw" less working hours per week. They expected that these machines would "complement" their skills and "work for them"- hence less work per person per week. Even some predicted that by the time we would reach 2000's, work hours per week would be 30 hours and long vacations per year. But how the situation is like? Everyone knows. During my maternity period, I used to read how other co-mothers had to join their work immediately after delivery so where is the minimum legal period of maternity? And those who are lucky enough to retain their jobs are even working 70 hours per week. Employed people are increasingly getting "burnouts" and they have no family life whatsoever. Where is the machine that was going to work for me? I think technology is at its best at the moment innit?
While there are many ideas floating around as to where these jobs are and how long this would continue, the most popular one is the "end of work" argument, so the technological progress is not too little but too much. And the economists could not see it prior to 1970's. This is particularly important for the third world countries who will face more crisis but how we are going to see it from the "Knowledge Economy" prospect.
The fact is that there are jobs in the market and these jobs are with ever highest salaries but there are not much capable persons to fill them up. These high profile jobs are those where humans are required to be ahead of machines and not to work parallel with them. Yes, this is the fact of today that you are no longer required to work parallel to machine. If you do so, soon you will be replaced with a machine who will better work in parallel with the other machine (your ex-colleague). However, there are areas where machines can't compete with humans and they can never do that. Machines are good with routine tasks but they cannot handle the non-routine tasks. That is where you punch-in. We already see a greatest restructuring in the economy. The banker's job which was considered the most high-profile job sometime ago, but now banking is not absorbing as many people as it used to do. Between January 2007 to January 2014, the gap between the jobs of computer programmers, consultants and likes and bankers has only been increasing. That is why they say that "computer programmers are in demand but bankers are not".
Although these superior skills are somehow available in developed world but for the developing countries, the answer is No in general. So what will happen in future? The money is already floating into a fixed sector of economy into a limited number of people so do we expect more people falling below the poverty line in the developing countries in future?
There are some open questions in this regard:
1- How can we distribute the superior skills through out the economy- skills in which humans work ahead of technology and not in parallel?
2- Do we need a social restructuring again where one person is the sole bread runner of the house and companies not using the slogan such as "we are equal opportunity employers"?
3- Are we able to design fiscal policies where work load is distributed appropriately so that the money circulates throughout the economy?
These are tough questions of today but I am sure twenty years ahead, we will not have at least this one as a challenge
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