Will technology steal your job?

Self driving cars may reduce need for a driver, self-cleaning homes may cut need of a house-help, automated industries may lessen the need to have thousands of factory workers, farms will be run by ploughing, seeding and harvesting machines that don’t need many operators, but is the future of employment that bleak?

Yesterday, the World Economic Forum shared on their blog the 2 reasons why technology will  not completely take over our jobs. As much as automation decreases the need for man power, ’employment grows faster in jobs where computers are used more but this trend is offset by the fact that computer-based roles replace other occupations. Computers boost the number of highly paid job roles requiring more educated workers – to the detriment of low-paid jobs. In a nutshell, this means that jobs don’t disappear, they simply move up the skills and wage ladder.’

Thus the more automation comes up, the more skills required from humans to work them and with them, at higher wages than if they worked the ground in a factory.

In another WEF report, it was stated that over 65% of today’s very young population just starting out in primary school will work jobs that do not even exist right now. All we have to do is prepare for very different types of job roles, not necessarily a reduction in employment overall. In the IT sector, these are some of the top jobs you might want to consider doing as automation technology becomes much higher in coming years:

Others agree, like James Bessen, an economist at the Boston University School of Law who was quoted in this report by The Economist saying that rather than destroying jobs, automation redefines them, and in ways that reduce costs and boost demand.

Should we be worried and hung up our gloves already? I say No. Firstly, we’re in a 3rd world country and the cost of automation machinery may take a while longer to be acquired by the public sector especially, giving a sense of security about employment rates especially for low to middle-income jobs for the next few years. It’s a bittersweet assumption on my part, that we won’t progress technologically as fast as other countries, but from patterns in years before there has been slower automation integration in industries of all types.

I may be wrong, but you can give your own opinion below.