In their 2011 book, "Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsso and Andrew McAfee lay out how information technologies are affecting jobs, skills and wages.
Their premise is that technology will result in a need for fewer workers. Those that are still needed will need to be highly skilled. A great restructuring is going to occur as the algorithms are better than ever.
We should remember that there is no economic law that people will benefit from technological progress. We can but there is work to do in order to assure that is so. We are entering new territory in the quest to lower labor costs. The current revolution in artificial intelligence will do to white collar jobs what robotics did to blue collar jobs. This will lead to a complete restructuring of the economy. In the new digital world, competition, labor and leadership are less important than collaboration, creativity and networks. While some point to a technology stagnation as the root cause, this book suggests the opposite. The digital revolution is allowing technology to replace skilled workers, doing things that only humans could once do. Digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices and grows the overall economic sphere. But it has also changed how the benefits of that world are distributed. As technology zooms ahead, it can leave many people behind. They suggest that not only are worker skills not keeping up but organizational structures are also not keeping up.
