The Robots Aren’t Going to Take Your Job. You Are.

What Are the Jobs of Tomorrow?

There’s this debate. “The robots are going to take our jobs!”, the cry arises. It’s true, but only in a tiny way. There’s a truer truth of the economy, more fundamental and more vital. The robots aren’t going to take your job. You are.

What do I mean? Let’s consider for a moment what we might mean by “the jobs of the future”. Are they factory jobs, warehouse jobs, retirees packing Amazon crates, and so on? Nope. Why not? Because the economy has already shifted to services. It’s quite alright if robots take those jobs, because they don’t create much real value to begin with, and so they make human beings miserable, by wasting their potential. You and I were made for better things. The real problem is that the economy isn’t creating the jobs of tomorrow — not that the robots are taking the jobs of yesterday. Let’s think about this in two ways, from the bottom up, and the top down.

You know and I know that the costs of things like pollution, gun deaths, and misinformation a la Facebok Russian electioneering should be counted somehow in GDP. We don’t count them, and so we have a deeply distorted picture of the economy, which is putatively “growing” — although no one’s life really is. How are we to count them? Now, I can tell you my ways. But that’s not the point. The jobs of the future begin right there, and trickle downwards.

Let’s imagine that as a company, I asked you to tell me your real costs and benefits, how much real wealth and value you were creating. How would you do it? You’d probably have to hire a Chief Something-New Officer, maybe a Head of Human Impact or Well-Being or Life. They’d have to hire a whole department. That department would have to be composed of whole new roles: from next-generation accounting, to finance, to service design, to management, to marketing, and so on. As you developed your new measures, ideas, frameworks, then, so too, the organization could begin to think anew, conceptualize truer, and innovate again. But really innovate this time — develop genuine breakthroughs, and it doesn’t matter what they are, whether they’re electric cars or life-saving drugs or democracy-saving media, only that they thus reverse the grim picture of “growth” without any real human benefits.