We are in the middle of a technological revolution, that is not news. We regularly hear about the consequences for the labour market and perhaps even for your job. Yet there is little talk about how we can prepare now for the time after the revolution. Professor Mark Levels, with his European research group Technequality, is looking into this.
Prof. Dr. Mark Levels is Professor of Health, Education and Work at Maastricht University and in that capacity leads the Technequality project. The research group has a clear goal: "to understand how technological innovation affects work, education and inequality".
Make or buy
A big part of the challenge we face as a society is the make or buy principle. When jobs change because of a revolution, the question is always whether to retrain and educate employees or let them go and find new ones. Mark has a clear preference for retraining and education, but says the solution actually lies a step earlier. We don't know for sure which jobs are going to disappear", Mark says, "but that jobs are going to disappear is certain. If we change the way we organise our education system now, for example, we will reap the benefits later and retraining will become part of the work system.
What we can do
"The trick is: how do we ensure that we as an economy benefit as much as possible from the potential productivity growth that automation makes possible, while mitigating the social consequences as much as possible," says Mark. In the podcast, he explains that this is done by thinking now about the situation later on, where it becomes clear that there are differences in how hard people are going to be hit. This creates new types of inequality, which we can still partly prevent.
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