It’s no new news that technology has been changing the way the workforce operates since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Ultimately, it has replaced a lot of low-skilled jobs, reducing the need to spend thousands of dollars to hire a few workers which 1 single robot could do more efficiently. In fact, with today’s AI tech, machines not cannot only do physical tasks anymore, soon they’ll be able to do more cognitive tasks, possibly replacing today’s newspaper article writers and such.
While this might strike fear in many as their job is on the verge of being replaced by machines, what they don’t realize is that for every job a technology replaces, it creates a lot of newer ones. Getting passengers for a taxi has never been easier with Uber, solar energy farms hire more workers than the coal mines, and so on.
In light of this, the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy has given thought as to how technology will improve the efficiency of the workforce, and how it will create new paths and opportunities for the future people. Here are 4 ways in which it could:
Job Creation and Income Growth
Source: Money | HowStuffWorks
In retrospect, technology could be used to create brand new jobs and pay better wages than the low skill low income jobs automations replace. One example would be Iora Health, who has created a new job category- Health coach. These people support the patients directly and act as the communicator between them and the medical professionals. They use medical record technology to gather and analyze data to determine the patient’s progress.
Skills Development & Opportunity Matching
Source: Giphy
The jobs of the future will be a quite different from today, with the most dramatic change probably being in the tech industry, with programmers, robotics engineers, AI creators, and so forth being the most demanded job. Hence, people of the future would need to hone their tech skills if they wish to get hired. And once they do get hired, they have to learn to connect with the appropriate job opportunities.
Technology Access
Source: PC World
It’s no secret that those who are able with access to technology and the internet have a bigger advantage than those who don’t. However, even now, only 54% of the world has access to the internet. To be able to compete with the economy of the future, we need to provide internet access to everyone. This is what the product Jana tries to solve by downloading specific apps to someone’s smartphone and providing the user with a stable internet connection in return.
Financial Inclusion
Even if a family has jobs and a stable income, a family’s financial stability could still be wonky. With 27 percent of Americans not having bank accounts or insurance. Destacane tries to solve this by developing an algorithm that checks an individual’s credit-worthiness by using alternative data gathered from credit-like services such as utilities, telecoms, and suppliers.
So while society can’t stop technology from evolving and replacing old jobs, we can encourage it to create new ones and enhance make harder jobs easier for everyone.
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