![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/0*vbN_LOidT-60chel.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFollow-up studies note that the AI-led new tech forces (New Tech from now on) most of the time will not devour jobs in its entirety. More often they will automate \u2018only\u2019 certain tasks of a job. Of course, when New Tech takes over enough of a job\u2019s tasks, the whole job will change beyond recognition, even disappear. We have seen that happening at the car-manufacturing conveyor belts, where now hardly any human being is left behind the machines, running on their own 24\/7\/365 in lights-out factories. Only some maintenance staff and long-distance supervisors are left. Right now, we can expect similar full job-destruction In China, where leading phone-manufacturing company Foxconn\u200a\u2014\u200athey probably produced your iPhone\u200a\u2014\u200athreatens to replace a substantial part of its worker\u2019s army (1.3 million on the payroll) by robots, as a reaction to human employees complaining about inhumane working conditions, culminating in suicides out of despair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So New Tech has the power to drive tremendous amounts of jobs going down the drain. Other jobs will \u2018only\u2019 be disrupted. Take mine: teaching. The heart of teaching consists of impromptu communication, full of unexpected twists as you never can prepare for all the surprising moments each class has in store for you. Teaching is filled with series of tiny decision-making moments. (For example: Is the afternoon classroom too hot and sunny, the mood amongst the students too tired to bring up a new demanding subject? Better wait till the next fresh morning?) These kind of decisions are difficult to code into the algorithmic language New Tech lives by. I, as a human being, am much better in sensing atmosphere. Teaching in general will not be taken over by New Tech anytime soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This though is not the end conclusion. We\u2019ve all watched the rise of online webinars enforced by Covid19, offering opportunities to serve many more students at the same moment than possible in a physical class. Here New Tech has been pretty helpful, facilitating the necessary\u00a0Turn to Virtual<\/a>, that we all have managed to embrace. But it won\u2019t imply physical school teaching will become obsolete any time or place soon. We are deeply attached to its serendipitous hallway encounters, its parties, protests and love affairs. Yet, New Tech will disrupt our traditional practices and definitions of teaching. Take, for instance, the traditional educational frame of 45 minutes teaching, then a 15 minutes break and then repeat. Copying this offline pattern into virtual class turns out to be cruelly exhausting. Zoom fatigue, even burnout lurk. New formats must be developed. Or consider exams. When I started teaching some decades ago, exams were held as personal conversations. Due to education\u2019s massification since then, multiple-choice exams are introduced: more cost & time-efficient, less prejudice-prone than humans, but lacking personal interaction. Old-school examination tasks have been predominantly automated away. Most teachers don\u2019t mourn the demise of them: they were tedious. This job tasks destruction actually opens the opportunity to focus on more rewarding parts of their jobs. Here New Tech\u2019s disruption empowers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To summarize, New Tech will destroy jobs but \u2018only\u2019 disrupt others. These disruptions can be painful but also empowering\u200a\u2014\u200athey even can be both at the same time. Some will dread New Tech as it might push them into the category of poor un-hopefuls. Some will criticize New Tech as an utterly unfair epitomizer of exploitive capitalism. Others will feel New Tech\u2019s fortunate winds under their wings. Still others will be made astoundingly rich by New Tech. All will wander through the future landscape of work. And create our future society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all jobs are created equal. What ones will flourish and enrich? What ones will come to look like modern slavery? What are the demarcation lines between them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only five years ago, the general opinion was that low-skilled jobs would be lost first. The extensive media-covered loss of blue collar manufacturing jobs in the USA\u2019s Midlands supported the opinion. Soon though, the picture turned out to be more nuanced. Also series of high-skilled jobs\u200a\u2014\u200atax accountants, administrators, radiologists, paralegals\u200a\u2014\u200aare experiencing changing tides. In contrast to this, several low-skilled jobs in the service industry\u200a\u2014\u200awaiters, cleaners, guards, lower ranks of hospital staff\u200a\u2014\u200amainly stayed safe, though their salaries often see no increases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a consequence, a new insight rose: the tasks New Tech takes over first do not so much follow the lines between low-skilled and high-skilled jobs. They follow the lines between routine and non-routine tasks. Recalculating tax administration paperwork is high-skilled but also routine, and therefore prone to automation. Same with radiologists. With robot\u2019s growing capacities to detect maladies, from potentially troublesome skin moles to cancerous spots within your body, they will automate away radiologist\u2019s high-skilled yet considerably routine core competence. Surprisingly in contrast to this, we see at the low end the skills continuum, jobs that are so multi-tasking and agile that New Tech is unable to grab them with their algorithms and leave them alone: garbage collectors, nail studio workers, dog care guardians. They are saved by the non-routine characters of their jobs. Actually, cohorts of jobs, that traditionally were considered low-skilled and low-status we now see climbing upscale because they are so non-routine and \u2018finger\u2019-dexterous, that they can claim a new respect: upscale butchers, bartenders who craft signature cocktails combining them with emotional intelligent social serving skills, arborists and massage therapists, bicycle mechanics and floral arrangers, furniture restorers and even tree huggers. New Tech won\u2019t touch these masters of craft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How people react when their jobs encounter New Tech, also differs. A substantial series of low-skilled routine jobs fall in the DDD-category: dull, dirty, dangerous. Take maintenance work at oil platforms at sea. The job implies climbing the platform constellation, high up in the air or below sea level, to assess and repair rust spots. Now drones with recognition software and monitoring equipment do the DDD job. That\u2019s generally appreciated as progress. But not when retraining programs can\u2019t find new jobs for those displaced. They will feel stuck, angry and treated unfairly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On other occasions, people will appreciate when AI & its companions take tedious job tasks off their hands and minds. To go back to my teaching profession, I actually am happy that my exam marking tasks are now handled by smart software. It opens my time for more satisfying, meaningful tasks. Every job has \u2018peripheral\u2019 components, like my tedious examination days. When they are automated away, it feels like a relief. However, when New Tech touches job components that are dear to its practitioners, people will react upset. Then the core of their professional tasks is attacked. That\u2019s a sensitive matter. It affects a person\u2019s job identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we want to assess the conquest routes that New Tech will follow through our future landscape of work, and how it will affect people, the distinction between \u2018skilled and non-skilled\u2019 (1) is helpful, but the distinction between \u2018routine versus non-routine\u2019 (2) predicts better. When we want to assess employees\u2019 reactions when New Tech enters their jobs, the distinction between \u2018peripheral\u2019 and \u2018core\u2019 (3) has explanatory value. Another relevant one is the distinction between \u2018replacement\u2019 versus \u2018empowerment\u2019 (4). Will New Tech primarily replace parts of my job\u200a\u2014\u200athe peripheral parts or the essential ones? And will it enable me to do my job better?<\/p>\n\n\n\n These four dimensions are the four main trenches running through the landscape of our future work. From there New Tech will annihilate and disrupt, enrich and empower our jobs. Conquering or alienating our hearts and minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three books together give a dynamic overview of winners and losers in the future landscape of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018The Second Machine Age. Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies\u2019 by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee is an award-winning publication overarching the landscape of work. It starts with a description of the First Machine Age: Western Industrial Revolution, when steam engines and later electric machines took heaps of heavy physical work from our ancestor\u2019s shoulders, many of them farmers. It helped agricultural yields to magnify beyond pre-industrial imagination. Many farmers, their sons and daughters, jobless at the countryside, left for the cities where they worked behind other machines, the factory ones. In the wake of this grand transformation came severe worker\u2019s exploitation, the rise of the proletariat, Marxism and intense societal upheavals. But later on also prosperity, the welfare state and consumerism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Second Machines Age, which we have entered now, New Tech starts dominating the landscape. First via computers and software programs, now with cloud computing<\/a> and AI\u2019s algorithms, next with the Internet of Things<\/a> and face recognition monitoring tools. They will speed up transformations and \u2018new normals\u2019 that pale those from the First Machine Age. Each machine back-then had to be physically produced which decelerates speed and spread. The leading \u2018machines\u2019 now are basically software. In contrast to trains and conveyor belts, they can be copied with a series of clicks. Brynjolfsson and McAfee speak about the \u2018the digitization\u2019 of everything. Others talk about software eating everything\u200a\u2014\u200adoing so revolutionary quickly. As a consequence, New Tech in its incomparable might, will not only reign over our working lives but over society in general. In \u2018Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow\u2019 celebrity philosopher-anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari even approaches New Tech as our new gods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How are the \u2018real\u2019 people faring under these new gods? Who amongst them will manage to prosper, who will perish? Tylor Cowen documents the answer in his book \u2018Average Is Over\u2019. He knows how to summarize the essence: \u201cThe key question will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer? If your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer you want to address<\/a> that mismatch. Evermore people are starting to fall one side of the divide or the other. That is why average is over.\u201d As a consequence, we can expect growing economic divides, intensifying social inequalities and the rise of a culture of anger, distrust and cynicism. Two books endorse and add to Cowen\u2019s insights\u200a\u2014\u200atheir titles are telling enough: \u2018Rise of the Robots. Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future\u2019 by Martin Ford and \u2018Humans Need Not To Apply, A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence\u2019 by Jerry Kaplan. Both are authoritatively well-documented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u2018Humans Are Underrated\u2019 Geoff Colvin takes another track through our future landscape of work. Also here the subtitle is revealing: \u2018What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will.\u2019 It is all about empathy. We all know what empathy is, how it feels and deeply enriches. Our bodies and minds unreservedly react to it. And we automatically sense when they are authentic and sincere. In spite of the blessings that New Tech can bring to our lives, it can\u2019t live up to human beings when it comes to sensing and radiating empathy and hospitality. Our DNA is hardwired around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Empathy workers\u200a\u2014\u200ain our hospitals and hotels, in our schools and shops, in retail and restaurants\u200a\u2014\u200atherefore have good chances to prosper in the future landscape of work as well. New Tech might be able to teach their robots how to smile, but it will be a derivative, a copy of the real thing \ud83d\ude0a. It will lack the natural spontaneity, depth, and impact that humans convey. Capturing \u2018a little bit of that human touch\u2019 in algorithms turns out to be devilishly difficult. (Just like Bruce Springsteen sings the song like no New Tech will ever can). It is one of the reasons why I feel fortunate to be a professor at Hotel School of Distinction, EUHT Barcelona and see the students there being taught the finesses of human hospitality and empathy. Their skills are not only of key importance for hotel business and tourist industry. They are needed in much broader areas of our (working) lives: from sales to education, from fitness to health. In the near future I see my students even collaborate with nerdy ict-professionals, teaching them how to add deeper layers of human sensitivity to their concepts and devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Covid forces very many of us to shift to remote work. But not all. Remote work is impossible for a broad category of lower-class workers. Think cleaners, guards, waiters, nurses and other hospital staff, substantial amounts of them not properly insured or not living in richer welfare states. They belong to the precariat, occupying jobs without a proper safety net, and understandably prone to anger and distrust. (Guy Standing\u2019s \u2018The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class\u2019 is another top book when it comes to understanding our future landscape of work\u200a\u2014\u200aand the whole of society for that matter.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many readers of this article though will be middle-class remote workers. For them, Covid has less precarious, more mid-term predicaments in store. These start with Zoom-fatigue in an era where nothing can be easily settled around offices\u2019 coffee machines. The technologies that enable us to work from home, also have ballooned communication. Which is a lot to digest behind the screen we watch much more than we watch our children. Working from home, as many do, now often boils down to living at work. This is not easy\u200a\u2014\u200aespecially under cramped conditions, solid workloads, and when you are really unlucky, remote micromanagers hovering above you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They all are the unpleasant consequences of working under Covid-conditions experienced by many, though not by all. On a deeper, less visible, and more latent level, the connection with our work environment as-we-knew-it is weakening. More stressed out under the new circumstances, with more lower-back pains and \u2018interruption rage\u2019 as new lifestyle ingredients, many employees (though not all!) might feel alienated from their job tasks and companies. How many of you working from working have had a conversation with a line manager about their well-being? As a consequence, Covid might have made working relationships more transactional than before. From both sides. Employees might feel less commitment now that the lines are predominantly online. And when employees now do their jobs from home, companies might ask themselves whether there are no cheaper alternatives for them from somewhere else? Be it the AI-empowered robot from the virtual world. Or a lower-paid professional from a developing country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" INTRO: 47 IS KILLING! In a 2017 study two scholars, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from Oxford University, suggest 47 percent of USA jobs could [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[406,1225,879,1290,113,27],"tags":[150,154,490,786,1372,1392,1394,1391,1402,1399,1397,1383,1362,1368,1352,1381,183,1389,612,1405,102,628,579,1375,1379,1377,1348,1390,1378,1355,1376,1347,718,1356,847,1404,428,1365,1351,798,799,1366,506,1353,1014,411,1350,596,1346,1388,1370,1369,1386,1374,1371,1367,1005,1178,1357,1200,1328,1380,1364,1393,1363,1382,128,1373,1359,1349,1354,74,132,357,1358,1360,1406,1407,1387,1385,1384,1403,1401,1398,1395,1361],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/0*q7ZsluNjB8xHHn9-.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFOUR DECISIVE DIMENSIONS<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
To summarize<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
LOSERS AND WINNERS : LITERATURE<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\u2018The Second Machine Age\u2019 by Erik Brynjolfsson<\/a> and Andrew McAfee<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1200\/0*ksPzcKo6Ylb8PM5Z.jpg\")
\u2018Average Is Over\u2019 by Tylor Cowen<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1200\/0*EtdGaAvDOObusYF_.jpg\")
\u2018Humans Are Underrated\u2019 by Geoff Colvin<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1200\/0*DYSB0xGn6tseIzkM.jpg\")
AND COVID?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/0*0Y0lImBVyTkInqfa.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n