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How the Fourth Revolution Will Create New Occupations
In this interesting Guardian post ‘The meaning of life in a world without work‘, Yuval Noah Harari explains that he sees a new class arise in a few decades: the useless class, spending their time deep playing in virtual worlds and creating no value to society. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.
The lift operator, an occupation that was replaced by automation a while agoI believe this is an erroneous vision. Again and again in the history of humanity, deep transformations of society have created situations where we could not envisage how we would keep busy and contribute to society in a few decades’ time. And it is true that in the transition a lot of people now past their 40’s might find it difficult to adapt to the new social conditions and find their place in the future society.
As a simple example, I wonder how the lift boys have been considering their replacement by automation!
However, again and again history has shown that people get busy and bring value to society in new ways that can’t really be fathomed a few decades earlier. Yes, probably the concept of industrial-age ‘job’ will disappear; a lot of current trades will become obsolete, and basic low qualification work will be replaced by robots. I remain quite optimistic however that we won’t end with a large percentage of people subsidized to do nothing while a minority would create social value. It is not the direction of history, and in spite of an increasing abundance I am sure that the same will happen again: our occupations of tomorrow can’t even be imagined, but they will be present.
