A Key Theme for 2021: Understanding the Future of Work after COVID-19

Understanding the future of work after COVID-19 will be a key theme of 2021.

Every day we hear stories of new technologies that are taking on tasks we thought, until recently, only human beings could ever do – making medical diagnoses and driving cars, composing music and writing news reports, designing buildings and drafting legal contracts.

What does this mean for the vast majority of us for whom our job is our main, if not our only, source of income? I wrote A World Without Work because I don’t think we are taking seriously enough the threat of a world where there is not enough well-paid work for everyone to do, precisely because of the remarkable technological changes that are now underway.

To be clear, I don’t anticipate some technological big bang in the near future after which large numbers of people will wake up suddenly to find themselves without work. That is very unlikely to happen; there will be work for some time to come.

I worry instead about a more gradual problem – as we move through the 21st century, more and more people might find themselves unable to make the sorts of economic contributions to society that they might have hoped or expected to make in the past.

This may be a less dramatic vision of the future than some commentators are predicting. But it is no less problematic. And in my view, it will present us with three fundamental challenges to how we live together today.

To start, there is an economic challenge – technological progress may make us more materially prosperous than ever before, but how will we share out that prosperity when our traditional way of doing so, paying people for the work that they do, is less effective than in the past?

The second challenge has less to do with economics: how do we constrain the rise of the large technology companies, or Big Tech, who are responsible for developing these new technologies in the first place? In the 20th century, our main worry was the economic power of large corporations. But this century, we will be far more concerned with their political power, and the impact they have on liberty, democracy, and social justice.

And finally, there is the challenge of finding meaning and purpose. It is often said that work is not simply a source of an income, but also of direction and fulfilment. If that is right, then the threat of technological change is not simply that it might hollow out the labour market, but that it might also hollow out the sense of meaning that many people have in their lives.

These are the challenges that we will face in a world with less work, and in my view we are not yet giving them proper thought. But nobody could have predicted how a global pandemic would transform economic life and make them more urgent than ever.

To begin with, the pandemic has given us a frightening glimpse of the future that I have just described. Over the last few months, we have found ourselves in a world with less work – not because ‘the robots took all the jobs’, but because this virus has completely decimated the demand that so many of those jobs relied upon, and the interventions that have been required to contain its spread have made economic matters worse. As a result, the challenges that I thought we would face with growing severity in the decades to come, we have instead had to face right now because of COVID-19.

To see this, first take the economic challenge. The problem we have confronted over the last 8 months is simply a more dramatic version of the one set out before: overnight, vast numbers of workers around the world woke up to suddenly find themselves without a job and an income. And so, we have been forced to find ways of sharing prosperity in society when we cannot rely on the world of work to do it.

Then there is the power of Big Tech. A very striking feature of the pandemic has been how a small number of large technology companies have done astoundingly well – at one point, just five of them accounted for more than 20 per cent of the worth of the entire S&P 500 index – while the many smaller businesses that make up the backbone of our economic lives, have been struggling to stay afloat.

And finally, consider the challenge of meaning and purpose. One of the most interesting features of public discussion over the last few months has been its focus on how to best spend our time in the enforced idleness in which we have found ourselves under lockdown – not simply how to bake sourdough, do DIY, or plant some vegetables, but how to strike the right work-life balance, maintain our mental health in tough times, and re-focus on our families and communities.

But the pandemic has not simply given us a glimpse of the challenges we will face in the future. It has probably also accelerated our journey, by increasing the threat of automation.

One reason for this is that countries around the world have found themselves in severe recessions, and there is evidence to suggest that automation can speed up. Around the beginning of the 21st century, for instance, the jobs hardest hit by technological change appeared to be middle-skilled jobs; one influential study suggests that, since the mid-1980s, 88 per cent of those job losses took place within a year of a recession.

Another is that the pandemic has created a new incentive to replace people with machines: the latter, after all, cannot catch the virus, they will not fall ill and have to isolate to protect co-workers or customers, nor will they need to take time off work to recover.

Finally, the pandemic may have softened some of the cultural resistance that accompanies the use of new technologies in the workplace. Out of necessity, many of us have been forced to use technology to work remotely in ways that would have seemed unimaginable 12 months ago -- and in many cases, these technological experiments have been a success. And so, any particular act of automation in the future may now seem like less of an unprecedented step.

The future of work after COVID-19 will demand our attention in 2021. Though the pandemic will eventually recede, the threat of automation will not. On the contrary, as set out, that threat is likely to have increased. And the challenges that we have glimpsed over the last few months will return and test us once again. We must learn what we can from this year and prepare our response.

Daniel Susskind is a Fellow in Economics at Oxford University, a Visiting Professor at King’s College London, the co-author of The Future of the Professions (2015) and the author of A World Without Work (2020).