The COVID pandemic has changed many aspects of our work and culture. The shift toward remote online work has accelerated. People are reexamining what they do to make money, and how much money they need to make to earn a living. Many people who were on the brink of retirement retired earlier than they had expected. People in jobs they hated were given an opportunity to change careers. There are too many factors at play to list them all, but they culminate into some big fundamental shifts in employment trends.
For one thing, many people have a lot more money saved up than they’re used to. Many of the former employees of low-wage jobs now have extra money saved up from stimulus checks and over a year of not going out to spend money. They don’t want to go back to doing low-wage work as long as they still have savings and unemployment checks to keep them afloat. Businesses are struggling to find qualified staff.
What’s going to happen from here? I think many businesses are realizing that they actually don’t need to hire so many flaky employees. I think many businesses will look to automation solutions to reduce their reliance on hiring low-paid employees to do repetitive and manual labor. Artificial intelligence (AI) will be instrumental in replacing low-paid work.
In its current form, AI is really dumb. But businesses often hire people to do dumb, mindless things. These are the jobs that nobody really wants, but AI machines are fully capable of doing. Our future world may be a world where tedious, low-paid labor is replaced by AI machines, so that every human brain can be used to its full potential in creative and problem-solving jobs.
The pandemic did not create any new trends, but it has accelerated existing trends toward remote work, automation, and AI.
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