01/09/2017 How valuable will humans be in the workplaces of the future?

| World Economic Forum

We're asking all the wrong questions

about the future of jobs

A humanoid robot works side by side with employees on a Japanese assembly line
Image: REUTERS/Issei Kato

31 Aug 2017

Vasant Dhar
Professor, Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science.

Work is not what it used to be. The very concept of work has evolved considerably over the
centuries, as newer technologies have become integrated into how we function individually as
well as a society.

In engineering, work is defined as the product of force and distance. Early machines amplified
force and turbocharged human productivity, providing an early platform for industrialised
society. They eliminated physical grunt work and created new kinds of work for humans, such
as operating and fixing machines and using their capabilities in new ways. Computers have
similarly reduced our informational grunt work, enabling more productive, creative, and
rewarding work for humans.

But today’s machines are different in that they are increasingly figuring things out for
themselves. They have learned how to learn, a quality that has until now been exclusive to
humans. Our ability to perceive the world and integrate unstructured information
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/machines-and-the-future-of-work 1/5
01/09/2017 How valuable will humans be in the workplaces of the future? | World Economic Forum

spontaneously serves as the bedrock of much of human work. With machines now performing
this role, often better than us, how valuable will the human - or ‘nonroutine’ - aspects of work
be in the future?

Which jobs are most at risk of automation?

Image: BBC, Bank of England

The current political preoccupation with job numbers ignores the quality distribution of such
jobs. Of the 50,000 people Amazon is looking to hire immediately, for example, what
proportion has the potential for real career and earnings growth?

It isn’t possible to answer this question based on past data, because nonroutine work does
not lend itself well to scientific management-style observation, or the standard occupational
descriptions as laid down by the O*NET occupational classification system. Technology has
altered the composition of jobs and the associated skills required; the work of an accountant
or lawyer today, for example, is very different from what it was a decade or two ago.

The skill requirements of jobs change as what was nonroutine becomes routine. The superior
far-distance vision capability of professional drivers, for example, diminishes in value if a

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/machines-and-the-future-of-work 2/5
01/09/2017 How valuable will humans be in the workplaces of the future? | World Economic Forum

machine can see better than humans, and a superior ability to memorise precedents is less
valuable for lawyers if a machine can find them faster and better than humans. In order to
predict what impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on human work, we need to understand
at a detailed level the ‘digital fingerprint’ associated with work, and especially nonroutine
work.

Past research shows that automation has replaced routine tasks while complementing
nonroutine ones. Furthermore, the share of the labour force employed in occupations that
make intensive use of nonroutine tasks has increased substantially over the last few decades,
while those involving mostly routine cognitive and manual tasks have declined substantially. If
this is how the future will unfold, one might reasonably project that the nature of human
employment will depend on the supply, and in particular the demand, for nonroutine task-
oriented occupations.

But this routine/nonroutine view of the world is blurry and breaks down when autonomous
learning systems – as opposed to automated systems – become capable of performing tasks
previously considered nonroutine. In 1972 the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus asserted that
computers would never be able to perform simple tasks such as driving. As recently as 10
years ago, driving a vehicle was considered nonroutine and therefore inherently human. And
yet autonomous driving vehicles are about to make navigation largely routine. More generally,
machines are becoming better at other cognitive tasks long considered human, including
investment decision making, creating tax returns, and more. Big data, especially perception-
based data from systems that can see, hear, read, and touch, is providing machines with the
ability to learn on their own.

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute reported that 60% of occupations are 30%
automatable. The report notes that such occupations make up almost $2.7 trillion in wages in
the United States, slightly more than half the country’s total economic activity. The report also
envisions humans working alongside machines in new ways. Indeed, AI machines are already
redefining the boundaries of physical as well as cognitive work, helping humans with the time-
consuming or error-prone components of work. But when machines become much better than
us at making important nonroutine decisions involving our health, finance, navigation or
entertainment, for example, what value will humans add?

At universities, we teach students how to think in order to prepare them for the future
workplace. This is largely about how to conduct inquiry scientifically, which begins by asking
the right questions, formulating the problem, execution, analysis of outputs, and
communication of results. Some researchers have proposed that we should encourage
computational thinking, which considers these steps as a whole by “reformulating a seemingly
difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding,
transformation, or simulation”, according to Jeannette Wing, head of the computer science

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/machines-and-the-future-of-work 3/5
01/09/2017 How valuable will humans be in the workplaces of the future? | World Economic Forum

department at Carnegie Mellon University. Existing skills-based descriptions of work don’t

adequately address these increasingly important aspects of nonroutine knowledge work.

My research on the boundary between situations where we trust and those where we don’t
trust machines with decision making – which I call the ‘decision automation frontier’ –
depends on how often we expect the machine to be wrong and what the consequences of
that might be, especially in the worst case. We trust machines when they perform at a
predictable rate of accuracy and the cost of their errors is sufficiently low. For example,
searching for precedents for legal cases or ranking outcome predictions might be effectively
performed by machines, but tasks such as preparing the argumentation for how a legal case is
presented are human.

Interestingly, the O*NET work taxonomy categorises lawyers as requiring high levels of oral
and written expression and comprehension, stress tolerance, and integrity. Imagine if we could
take a bottom-up ‘digital snapshot’ of all legal work and allow the features to emerge from the
data? For example, what proportion of lawyers' time is spent on aspects of work such as
researching, writing and talking, and how are these valued by the labour market? The
measurement of cognitive activity associated with nonroutine work, which I have termed the
digital fingerprint of work, is a fertile area for research. Better instrumentation will yield a data-
driven picture of what jobs actually consist of, and a basis for predicting how they will change.

The digital fingerprint of work will undoubtedly vary across professions. For healthcare
professionals, nonroutine tasks might involve deep knowledge or medical skills, as well as
skills such as empathy and communication. For insurance professionals it might involve an
ability to assess risk based on records and subtle cues. In sports it might involve an analysis
of decision-making under pressure. In principle, these are all observable and measurable to
various degrees. But more research is needed to understand how humans and smarter
machines will complement and compete with each other at a micro level before we have the
basis for making predictions about the future of work.

Written by

Vasant Dhar, Professor, Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Subscribe for updates

A weekly update of what’s on the Global Agenda

Email
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/machines-and-the-future-of-work 4/5
01/09/2017 How valuable will humans be in the workplaces of the future? | World Economic Forum
Email
Subscribe

© 2017 World Economic ForumPrivacy Policy & Terms of Service

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/machines-and-the-future-of-work 5/5