Jobs - The Pub Talk After Work in 2025

Today, it only takes moments for a new story to appear about the latest technology wizardry.  Some of us foresee great opportunities in new types of jobs and are wildly excited about knowledge from the ‘beyond’ and ‘other’ horizons of technology innovation. But for most folk, the glass is half empty and the pub talk turns to impending Armageddon for human workers from bricklaying robots, robotic surgery and dentistry, 3D printed houses, avatar lawyers and accountants, AI enabled company directors, driverless transport and even cookie baking bots – displacing physical, low skilled, middle skilled and white collar professional work for men and women.  

Of course, disruption is not just about technology, there’s other powerful global forces at play, such as geo-political instability, global out-sourcing of jobs, the growing middle class of workers from maturing economies creating global competition for professional roles, women’s growing economic power, the ageing of society, the need for businesses to have stable energy resources and the displacement of 20th century analogue businesses by born digital enterprises. Anxiety is palpable and that’s understandable given that change has never occurred so fast in the history of mankind. 

How we respond now is so very critical to how the future plays out. This article puts some fresh colour onto the palette and paints a future landscape with three perspectives - a background, mid-ground and foreground.

The background perspective

is what history shows about change. Machines have always evoked fears of loss of livelihood and de-humanisation. Yet each new wave of innovation - from hunting to agriculture, industry and the information age – has created growth, prosperity and many more jobs. Jobs and skills have adapted, from hunter to farmer to ‘blue collar’ and white collar, new, higher ‘paid’ jobs requiring additional training and skills have continuously emerged. 

Now we are entering the era of ubiquitous intelligent technologies, massively connecting people, data and things, through an ambient digital atmosphere covering almost everywhere in the world and into space. Some call this the 4th Industrial revolution, I call this phase the digital social era, in Japan the term super smart society has also been used, reflecting Japanese intent to harness new technologies for the advancement of a better society for all (Kaidanren – Japanese Business Federation, April 2016). 

There are numerous bodies reporting future jobs impacts (egWorld Economic Forum, Committee for Economic Development Australia, PWC, US Bureau of Labour Statistics). The median of forecasting estimates suggest that by 2025, between 40 – 50% of today’s jobs will disappear and for the remaining jobs, significant skill set changes will be required. Entirely new jobs are also emerging.

Rapid upheaval makes this transition different from previous evolutionary changes. To picture the scale and speed of this, the world population is estimated to reach around 8.1 bn people by 2025 with 55% of these people being of working age (United Nations, World Populations Prospects Reports: 2015 Revision). This suggests that 2.0 bn people are facing unemployment and / or re-skilling in the coming decade. 

This conjures up dystopian images of global jobs wars, a competition of one nation’s workforce strategy over another. Yet in our globalised labour markets, labour arbitrage is boundary-less. We shouldn’t compete, but instead attend to the conditions and opportunity landscape of the least advantaged.   

It is critical to intensify international aide programmes targeting education in poorer countries - for example, across the fastest growing populations, a group of African nations, school attendance is as low as 30% of all children. Education creates the capacity to flourish. It is the primary factor in lifting per capita GDP and lowering high fertility rates in countries whose population growth needs to stabilise over the next decade to arrest poverty. 

In developed economies, the net changes to workforce could see a generation (or more) of displaced workers, requiring far reaching adjustments to education, human services and social safety nets.

The mid-ground scene

shows what workers will be doing in 2025 across relevant sectors – the unstable jobs, growing jobs and emerging new jobs. The infographic is a jobs catalogue based on both research and imagination. It also shows, for each sector, the relative impacts of the four major groupings of high impact technologies in this period – Artificial intelligence and robotics; Virtual and augmented reality and the human machine interface; 3D printing and nano-technology and cyber security and blockchain.

Scenes from work in 2025......

International aid work

Grace, a graduate in international studies, majoring in democracy design, and Katie, an engineer and digital platforms designer, work for an international aid programme. They’re working in Africa, guiding emerging states in resilient systems of government and sustainable development, leveraging digital platforms to perpetuate good policy, governance, trade and investment, citizen engagement and service delivery.

Down on the farm

A driver-less tractor guided by GPS and sensors ploughs and harvests the crops. Meanwhile, James, the farmer, sets about mixing and distributing compost specific to the digitally monitored soil and moisture conditions. He runs lambs through the digital sheep yards, which automatically weighs and separates the group at optimal readiness for sale. He checks over an injured steer using a robotic handling machine and CAT scanner.

Teaching and learning

Nick, an e-lance university lecturer and renowned researcher into genetic healing, beams himself into his globally transmitted 3D-telepresence tutorial. His expertise is franchised to 12 top universities around the world. One of the students attending his lecture is Tran, a PhD student who studies at Western Sydney University but lives in Vietnam. Millie, an online success coach, notices through analytics that her student Jane is showing indications of dropping out of her online studies. Millie intervenes to introduce her virtually to other online students who are succeeding, building a supportive study group network.

Emily, a primary school teacher, uploads the day’s classroom activity plan to her classroom help-bot Robert. Robert generates a plan specific to each child and a graphic showing which children should be seated together to maximise everyone’s learning experience.

Community values and simplicity

By 2025, the silver lining from the displacement of large numbers of workers will be seen in a return to community-connectedness. And from this, the creation of shared resources across a growing peer-to-peer caring and helping economy.

The foreground perspective

Finally, to complete this future landscape, the fore-ground is the fabric of working life in 2025. It paints in the essential workplace attributes, worker skill sets and aptitudes and the organisational factors for mastery and leadership of an enterprise in the digital social era.

Standing back to inspect the canvas, I detect the light and shade of a utopian (but achievable) glass half full super smart society, with automation and intelligent machines being deployed in service of a better society for all.