"Issue: **A/IS are changing the nature of work, disrupting employment, while technological change is happening too fast for existing methods of (re)training the workforce.
## BackgroundThe current pace of technological development will heavily influence changes in employment structure. In order to properly prepare the workforce for such evolution, actions should be proactive and not only reactive. The wave of automation caused by the A/IS revolution will displace a very large share of jobs across domains and value chains. The U.S. “automated vehicle” case study analyzed in the White House 2016 report_ Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy _is emblematic of what is at stake: “
1. 2 to
1. 1 million existing part- and full-time U.S. jobs are exposed over the next two decades, although the timeline remains uncertain.”18The risk of unemployment for LMIC is more serious than for developed countries. The industry of most LMIC is labor intensive. While labor may be cheap(er) in LMIC economies, the ripple effects of A/IS and automation will be felt much more than in the HIC economies. The 2016 World Bank Development Report stated that the share of occupations susceptible to automation and A/IS is higher in LMIC than in HIC, where such jobs have already disappeared. In addition, the qualities which made certain jobs easy to outsource to LMIC where wages are lower are those that may make them easy to automate.19 An offsetting factor is the reality that many LMIC lack the communication, energy, and IT infrastructure required to support highly automated industries.20 Notwithstanding this reality, the World Bank estimated the automatable share of employment, unadjusted for adoption time lag, for LMIC ranges from 85% in Ethiopia to 62% in Argentina, compared to the OECD average of 57%.21In the coming decades, the automation wave calls for higher investment and the transformation of labor market capacity development programs. Innovative and fair ways of funding such an investment are required; the solutions should be designed in cooperation with the companies benefiting from the increase of profitability, thanks to automation. This should be done in a responsible way so that the innovation cycle is not broken, and yet workforce capacity does not fall behind the needs of 21st century employment. At the same time, A/IS and other digital technologies offer real potential to innovate new approaches to job-search assistance, placement, and hiring processes in the age of personalized services. The efficiency of matching labor supply and demand can be tremendously enhanced by the rise of multisided platforms and predictive analytics, provided they do not entrench discrimination.22 The case of platforms, such as LinkedIn, for instance, with its 470 million registered users, and online job consolidators such as indeed.com and Simply Hired, are interesting as an evolution in hiring practices,at least for those able to access the internet.Tailored counseling and integrated retraining programs also represent promising grounds for innovation. In addition, much will have to be done to create fair and effective lifelong skill development/training, infrastructures, and mechanisms capable of empowering millions of people to viably transition jobs, sectors, and potentially locations, and to address differential geographic impacts that exacerbate income and wealth disparities. Effectively enabling the workforce to be more mobile—physically, legally, and virtually—will be crucial. This implies systemic policy approaches which encompass housing, transportation, licensing, tax incentives, and crucially in the age of A/IS, universal broadband access, especially in rural areas of both HICand LMIC."p.147-149"Issue: **Analysis of theA/IS impact on employment is too focused on the number and category of jobs affected, whereas more attention should be addressed to the complexities of changing the task contentof jobs.
## BackgroundCurrent attention on automation and employment tends to focus on the sheer number of jobs lost or gained. It is important to focus the analysis on how employment structures will be changed by A/IS, rather than solely dwelling on the number of jobs that might be impacted. For example, rather than carrying out a task themselves, workers will need to shift to supervision of robots performing that task. Other concerns include changes in traditional employment structures, with an increase in flexible, contract-based temporary jobs, without employee protection, and a shift in task composition away from routine/repetitive and toward complex decision-making. This is in addition to the enormous need for the aforementioned retraining. Given the extent of disruption, workforce trends will need to measure time spent unemployed or underemployed, labor force participation rates, and other factors beyond simple unemployment numbers.The _Future of Jobs 2018 _report of the World Economic Forum highlights:“...the potential of new technologies to create as well as disrupt jobs and to improve the quality and productivity of the existing work of human employees. Our findings indicate that, by 2022, _augmentation _of existing jobs through technology may free up workers from the majority of data processing and information search tasks—and may also increasingly support them in high-value tasks such as reasoning and decision-making as augmentation becomes increasingly common over the coming years as a way to supplement and complement human labour.The report predicts the shift in skill demand between today and 2022 will be significant and that “proactive, strategic and targeted efforts will be needed to map and incentivize workforce redeployment… [and therefore]... investment decisions [on] whether to prioritize automation or augmentation and the question of whether or not to invest in workforce reskilling."150-152