Page 45 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being
rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e.

sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and
potentially millions, of job losses.

As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face
interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening
with call centres will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.

“Automation anxiety” is therefore set for a revival, [32] which the
economic recession will exacerbate. The process of automation is
never linear; it tends to happen in waves and often in harsh

economic times, when the decline in companies’ revenues makes
labour costs relatively more expensive. This is when employers
replace less-skilled workers with automation to increase labour
productivity. [33] Low-income workers in routine jobs (in

manufacturing and services like food and transportation) are those
most likely to be affected. The labour market will become
increasingly polarized between highly paid work and lots of jobs
that have disappeared or aren’t well paid and are not very

interesting. In emerging and developing countries (particularly
those with a “youth bulge”), technology runs the risk of
transforming the “demographic dividend” into a “demographic
nightmare” because automation will make it much harder to get on

the escalator of economic growth.

It is easy to give way to excessive pessimism because we
human beings find it much easier to visualize what is disappearing
than what is coming next. We know and understand that levels of

unemployment are bound to rise globally in the foreseeable future,
but over the coming years and decades we may be surprised. We
could witness an unprecedented wave of innovation and creativity
driven by new methods and tools of production. There might also
be a global explosion of hundreds of thousands of new micro

industries that will hopefully employ hundreds of millions of
people. Of course, we cannot know what the future holds, except
that much will depend on the trajectory of future economic growth.

1.2.2.3. What future growth could look like

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