Читать книгу Work Disrupted - Jeff Schwartz - Страница 17

While portions of many jobs will change, and some jobs will likely be eliminated entirely, many more jobs will evolve. When agricultural processes were mechanized in the nineteenth century, some farmworkers lost their jobs, but they ultimately earned more money working in factories. The automation of industrial production displaced factory workers in the twentieth century but they moved into service jobs. What we tend to forget is that rising productivity creates new jobs. Indeed, technological innovation has historically delivered more jobs, not fewer. And the new jobs often required more skills and paid higher wages.

As an economist and business consultant who has spent the past decade immersed in the issues surrounding the future of work, I have explored the topic with innovative thinkers and business leaders wrestling with the opportunities and challenges presented by this changing landscape. I spent half of the past decade based in New York and half in Delhi and Mumbai, working across India and Asia. I have advised companies and government agencies grappling with the mysteries that lie ahead. And I continue to bear witness each day to the dramatic changes taking place at the forefront of some of the largest and most successful businesses in the United States and around the world.

This book offers guidance to individuals, business leaders, and institutions so they can make smart choices. Organizations are poised to shape what ultimately becomes the future of work, as individual workers face broad options regarding how and where they work, as well as the skills and capabilities they want to gain to secure their livelihood. While we appear to welcome consumer technologies in our personal lives—we have managed to master more than 10 versions of smartphones (Apple and Android) since they were introduced in 2007 and 2008, respectively—we are more uncomfortable with tech innovations that will ultimately transform in profound and meaningful ways our work, who does the work, and where work is done.²¹

Individuals are searching for ways to continue to contribute their skills, procure value, and have an impact in the marketplace. Employers are facing important choices about whether to use advances in technology to drive efficiency and reduce costs or to explore how to harness technology to reshape jobs in ways that yield more value and meaning. Citizens, educators, and policy makers face a call to reconsider how we prepare and train people for the changing workplace and what paths are available to individuals to gain new skills throughout longer lives with multiple chapters of career reinvention.

Perhaps the most important question concerning the future of work is not what might happen in the future, but what do we want to have happen—the future of work to what end? When asked what employment relations would look like in 2030, the answer provided by Louis Hyman, a professor of labor history at Cornell, struck a chord. “It's hard to talk about the future,” he said, “because we actually have choices.”²² The challenge in this century is to understand and take advantage of the opportunities that technology and new ways of working afford us. In research at the Center for the Edge, Deloitte found that most future-of-work efforts are focused on reducing cost, increasing efficiency, and replacing workers with technology.²³ Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at MIT, refers to this as the “wrong kind of AI.”²⁴ The opportunities, as yet largely unrealized, are to expand our focus beyond cost, which is important but not the end in itself, to include value for customers and to provide meaning for the workforce and society. We return to this topic in the last section of the book.

Source: Chart courtesy of MIT Sloan Management Review, ©MIT; “Reframing the Future of Work,” by Jeff Schwartz et al, February 2019