“Experts differ widely in their predictions about how technological innovation will change the labor market, but they all see a need for changes in education,” write British professors Ewart Keep and Phillip Brown in a recently published article, Rethinking the Race Between Education and Technology. While experts don’t generally agree on much, they’re pretty much of one mind when it comes to the growing importance of skills and education in our 21st century digital economy.
Every past technological transformation ultimately led to more jobs, higher living standards and economic growth. But, as a number of recent studies concluded, to ensure that this will indeed be the case, our emerging knowledge economy should be accompanied by the expansion of educational opportunities for everyone.
While noting that this is the most likely scenario for the next 10 - 15 years, Keep and Brown also consider two potential longer-term scenarios. Perhaps AI will lead to even more pervasive and fundamental transformations in the nature of work, making it difficult for even those with a college or higher education to find a good job. Beyond that, some have suggested that in the more distant future we might see an even more radical, science-fiction-like transformation: the end of work as we’ve long known it.
The authors argue that considering such a spectrum of possibilities will help us better prepare for what’s essentially an unpredictable future. In that spirit, their paper discusses three different labor market scenarios: labor scarcity, job scarcity, and the end of work.
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