What 'The Jetsons' gets wrong about the future of jobs


A provocative new study from Oxford University, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” estimates that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being automated in the next 20 years.

According to many experts and popular culture like "The Jetsons," the first jobs to go will be house cleaning and “other working-class occupations that educated elites have historically looked down upon as ‘unskilled.’” In reality, these jobs require a great deal of social intelligence, creativity, problem-solving and language understanding skills that are quite difficult to automate, argues Miles Brundage, a doctoral student at ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, in a Future Tense article for Slate magazine.

"The Jetsons" assumed that machines like Rosie the Robot would be excellent at tasks like “perception and manipulation, creative intelligence and social intelligence,” but in fact, these are among the most difficult tasks to teach machines to perform. Brundage writes that even for what we have traditionally considered low-skill labor, the “gap between humans and current AI is vastly greater than the differences between humans.”

Despite his reservations about the Oxford study’s implications about the limited creative and social skills of low-wage workers, Brundage credits the authors for pointing toward an important issue: “how we can best structure our education system and ensure ready access to retraining services so that everyone has a fair shot at thriving in the labor market of the future.” Changes in education policy are essential in a changing labor market, to help people learn skills that are difficult or impossible to mechanize.

Brundage concludes by imagining a future in which “made (or served) by humans” could be the “organic” or “free trade” of the future, as consumers work collectively to resist the elimination of jobs that keep low-wage earners in the labor force. To learn more about the study and discover what Undercover Boss has to teach us about the future of jobs, visit Future Tense.

Article source: Slate magazine

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