The bottom line: The pandemic has shown us that many of us can do our jobs remotely because at the end of the day, we’re primarily working with a computer online. Don’t be surprised if more and more of that work is done by the computer itself.
We often hear that economic change makes certain jobs obsolete, while creating a new set of jobs to replace those lost. We also have seen studies that show some/many of those new jobs are “low salary service jobs”, and there’s no mechanism that says the new set of jobs will be as numerous as the previous jobs either. Then we also have a global economy where jobs are exported away from the US to lower salary expenses, even just a few miles across the border, as with the Maquiladoras assembly factories.
It seems little has actually been done to change the above dynamic, and meanwhile more economic changes are underway of a somewhat different sort.
This article is talking about the future of jobs, as part of the ongoing discussion about robots replacing humans in the workforce. What’s new is that it’s talking about white collar jobs being replaced by software robots. If jobs are exported, and replaced, and become obsolete, how will US citizens earn a living? This once was a lot more abstract and “off in the future” than it is currently with WFH “revolution” underway.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Coronavirus-will-accelerate-coming-of-virtual-hybrid-workforce-Axios.pdf”]