Future Jobs

What will the work world of the near future look like?  What are the societal challenges that will come up in the coming machine age?  How will this change how we look for employment?  Take time to craft a 3 paragraph response to what you've learned about the future of work in this video.

    In the near future, the work world will be more and more supplemented with technology until, inevitably, many jobs will be replaced with automation. This change is practically guaranteed, as if you were to compare the way that labor looked like throughout the past century, you'd see drastic changes. Take a grocery store, with the addition technology such as computer, there are considerably less workers needed in store at all times as a lot of work have been massively supplemented with computers, scanners, near automatic cash registers, self-checkouts, cleaning robots, cameras, etc. This has happened to a lot of different industries and workplaces, meaning that there are much less jobs available to a huge population of people.

    The challenges which society is going to face in the coming machine age are a steadily shrinking middle class and larger wealth gap. With the issue of less work available, especially for uneducated people who relied on lower-leveled white-collared work and blue collared-work, the people who are in worse financial situations are losing out on jobs. This makes their standards of living much worse and aggravates other issues in their lives. However, this supplementation has largely left the upper middle class unaffected because their jobs often are more thinking-based and required human thought and education. Thus, they maintain their livelihoods and don't face more challenges in life because of their stable financial situations.

    As for employment, this change will lead to the loss of many jobs which will no longer need humans to do and thus make every opportunity more impacted and sought after. However, it may also lead to a boost for creative and thinking jobs as people will no longer have to do labor work. Unfortunately, with the current values and conflicts politically, most people will still suffer from a lack of work as they won't have any income to ensure that they will be able to live. The solution proposed in the video was to give everyone a set stable income that they could live off of; however, it opposes many values that a lot of Americans hold, which means that the solution would never get enough traction because of the massive opposition to it.