Are our working days numbered because of the technological progress?

While technological progress, especially in the fields of automatisation, robotics and artificial intelligence is making us very excited about the way our life is getting easier, one of the major concerns of experts and just ordinary people is the amount of job vacancies available to employees in the future. Will we still have jobs in the future when the technology becomes even more powerful?

The predictions for the future marketplace for employees

Many experts and researchers have been making their estimations for the marketplace of jobs available to people in the future. The majority of them revealed rather doomed future in which up to 40% of jobs done today by people will be fully automated.

Certainly, there is a great variety of things which robots and computers can make better than people. Starting from the tasks requiring physical force and especially repetitive actions up to the tasks requiring analysing a huge amount of data, there is a whole variety of things which can be handed over to devices.

In fact, this process started a long time ago when the automatisation of the world just began. Since that time we have been observing a huge change of the market place.

At the same time, experts are sure that the technology in its current condition is still not developed enough for taking responsibility for creative tasks. This is obvious to many people who have at least modest understanding of the way artificial intelligence is functioning. Yet, there are also other tasks which might seem less creative, albeit they are still difficult to be performed by devices only.

Surprisingly, the cleaning sector is one of such examples. It turns out that cleaning process is a very complex task when it comes to technology especially when it includes working with various objects and surfaces.

Another example is childcare and education which still requires human professionals. Finally, while we have an opportunity to make our lives easier by using various home appliances, in all likelihood the process will not be fully automated so that people will still have to take care of their household tasks on their own.

The truth beyond the technological progress

Undeniably, the trend of technology getting into various spheres of our lives helping us to solve various problems and occasionally leaving us without jobs is pretty obvious. Still, not all of the experts are sure about our working days being numbered.

Other analysis of the social and economical changes which are taking part due to the development of technology showed a bit different trend. According to some experts, technology is not necessarily leaving us without work and in many cases, it actually gives us even more tasks to do.

It turns out that the initial aim of technology to save people from slavery worked in a rather limited way. Certainly, the developed world is giving its citizens a variety of solutions which allow them not to spend a tremendous amount of time on repetitive and tedious work. Yet, in the reality, people are even more overloaded with various tasks.

What happens today is that instead of specialising in one particular sphere, the majority of employees have to maintain the entire technology system. On the one hand, this system is helping them to make their work more effective, however, it is also taking lots of time which could have been spent by employees on their major tasks.

Today , many specialists are spending a large amount of time on sustaining computer systems which are in fact not related to many jobs directly. This part of work is now demanded by employers who expect their employees to have enough knowledge to deal with various computer and information systems even though this is not a part of their specialisation. It does not matter whether you are a doctor, a teacher or a shop-assistant  as you will have to find time for solving computer tasks.

Work with computers requires not only your own attention, but also educating others about the way they are functioning. It turns out that many specialists working in the developed countries are struggling with time management since they just cannot focus on their primary job while trying to keep in tact all of the things which are needed to be done to maintain computer systems.

As a result, the average time spent at work in the developed world simply cannot be reduced. furthermore, many people have to spend even more time working to be able to balance all of the variety of tasks they have which is now a standard for employment.

Even if for some jobs it is possible to reduce the working time, many employers do not grant it as free time to their employees. They are just adding new and new tasks to fill the free time of their workers. It hardly looks like a world without jobs for people, though.