012Upskilling is thefuture Ð but it mustwork for everyoneEDITOR’S ESSAYILLUSTRATION:^ GREGORI^ SAAVEDRABSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2018 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2018 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2017 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer
2017 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2017 • BSME Print Writer of the Year 2017 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Cover of the Year 2015 • DMA Technology
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Entire Magazine 2011 • D& AD Award: Covers 2010 • Maggies Technology Cover 2010 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2010 • BSME Launch of the Year 2009Greg Williams
EditorAutomation and job displacement
will be one of the most significant
challenges for the global economy of the
coming decades. A 2017 McKinsey report
estimated that 375 million workers – 14
per cent of the global workforce – will
need to switch occupational categories
by 2030. This is comparable to the shift
from agricultural economic models to
industrial ones in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. In one of the
most cited papers on the subject, The
Future of Employment: How Susceptible
Are Jobs to Computerisation?, Carl Frey
and Michael Osborne from the University
of Oxford estimated 47 per cent of total
US employment to be at risk.
The impact of technologies such as
artificial intelligence and robotics is a
hot research subject: a paper publishedin July this year by German and Danish
academics concluded that “firms that
adopted robots between 1990 and 1998
increased the number of jobs by more
than 50 per cent between 1998 and 2016,
while firms that did not adopt robots
reduced the number of jobs by more
than 20 per cent over the same period.”
The World Economic Forum suggests
that by 2022, automation will displace
75 million jobs globally – but create
133 million new ones. However, in his
bracing new book The Technology Trap,
Carl Frey extrapolates from the history of
the industrial revolution to offer a vision
of the future in which Amazon Go, AI
assistants and autonomous vehicles
are “worker replacement” technologies.
Research into the likelihood that a
job will be impacted by digitisation has
largely focused on the “automatability”
of the role and the subsequent economic,
regional and political implications of this.
What this research doesn’t take into
account is something more important
for the millions of taxi drivers and retail
workers across the globe: their likelihood
of being able to transition to another job
that (for now) isn’t automatable.
Recent research suggests that the
answer to this may be that the skills that
enable workers to move up the ladder
to more sophisticated roles within their
current areas might be less important
than broader skills that will enable
workers to transition across sectors.
In July, Amazon announced that it
would spend $700m retraining around
30 per cent of its 300,000 US workforce.
While laudable, it will be interesting tosee the outcome. In the UK, the National
Retraining Scheme has largely been
led by employers, meaning that those
on zero-hours contracts and part-time
workers – often low-skilled – will miss
out. Governance will be a crucial element
of ensuring that such schemes focus on
individuals and life-long learning, rather
than upskilling workers into roles that
will soon also face automation.
According to the McKinsey report,
“growing awareness of the scale of the
task ahead has yet to translate into
action. Public spending on labour-force
training and support has fallen steadily
for years in most member countries
of the Organisation for Economic Co-
Operation and Development.”
This impacts not only the low-skilled
and poorly compensated. Goldman
Sachs once had 500 people on its
equities trading desk; it now has three.
The global impact of automation is
also put into relief by research demon-
strating that, if China and India are
taken out of the picture, between 1988
and 2015, income inequality increased
throughout the world, particularly in the
west. Elsewhere, billions of people do not
have the essentials of life as defined by
the UN Sustainable Development goals.
Globalisation has brought enormous
benefits to the world, but it has taught
us that complacency towards the
impacts of change can lead to social
unrest and political instability. We need
to ask ourselves, what does prosperity
look like in the 21st century?
Alongside climate change, automation
is arguably tech’s biggest challenge. As
with globalisation, governments and
employers – and us workers – ignore
its potential consequences at our peril.09-19-FREdsletter.indd 12 19/07/2019 11: