High Unemployment and Endless Vacancies in the Intelligent Age

Every day, the future changes. It feels almost messianic, rushing toward us. So, what does the future hold? This question recurs each time extraordinary machinery appears. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the new silver linings. But every silver lining has a dark cloud.

In Book XVIII of Homer’s “Iliad”, set during the final weeks of the ten-year Trojan War, Thetis visits the forge of Hephaestus to request new armour for her son Achilles. There she finds twenty self-propelled tripods on golden wheels that allowed the tripods to move on their own accord to the assemblies of the Gods and return home. At the time of Thetis’ visit, Hephaestus was in the process of attaching “ears” to the tripods.

These automated tripods were part of a broader, fantastical depiction of Hephaestus’ workshop, which also included handmaidens of gold endowed with intelligence, speech, and strength. Years later, Aristotle, in his “Politics” (350 B.C.E./1998), speculated on the obsolescence of human labour if instruments could work on their own. However, it was J. M. Keynes, in “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, in Essays in Persuasion (1930, pp. 321–332), who famously predicted technological unemployment.

What is clear is that AI will create more and improved jobs. A white-collar apocalypse is not on the horizon. Dreams will be erased and others rewritten. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 “Jobs of the Future Report” underscores that forty-one per cent of employers intend to reduce their workforce by 2030. The IMF has cautioned that sixty per cent of jobs are already exposed to AI in advanced economies and forty per cent in emerging markets.

The Inter-American Development Bank’s 2024 index of occupational exposure finds that 980 million jobs worldwide face a high risk of disruption in 2025. These three reports collectively drag the anchor that jobs once provided. Work has lost its moorings.

In the West Indies, the patterns and practices of work in the pre-independence and post-colonial eras remain ill-suited to a future in which authority is delegated to technological artefacts. An imperial personnel model devised to manage workers is no longer helpful. The future is about how we manage fluid work. Not overseeing workers.

The IDB occupational exposure report shows that the average occupational exposure to AI is 0.28 within one year, increasing to 0.38 and 0.44 over the five- and ten-year horizons, respectively. An exposure score of 0.28 suggests that, on average, jobs have a twenty-eight per cent  chance of being impacted by AI.

Applying these findings to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the IDB estimates around 84 million jobs will be exposed to AI within one year, rising to 114 million in five years, and 132 million in ten years. If this average exposure applies globally, it suggests that approximately 980 million, 1.33 billion, and 1.54 billion jobs are at risk over the one-, five-, and ten-year horizons, respectively.

COVID-19 changed how we work. AI is changing the way we work! AI is changing the Pandemic Effect on Work. Fluid Work is not about the gig economy. Fluid Work is characterised by a flexible and flat structure that breaks away from fixed hierarchies and roles. The focus is on productivity over physical presence. Discipline to deliver high-quality products that serve as fulcrums and pivots in action is the new benchmark.

The way we work locally must mirror how we work globally, rolling forward our workcraft and collaborating with AI companions.  As universities add courses, they must take stock of irrelevancies and weed out programs disconnected from the futures we are sketching. This is the only answer to the riddle of High Unemployment and Endless Vacancies. Future-ready graduates must have the skill to rewrite and correct AI-written code across all fields and disciplines as we close the skills chasm.

It requires lifelong learning and the development of digital skills that can be applied to different, temporary challenges. It establishes a balance between employee wellbeing and organisational efficiency. It restores equilibrium between personal life and professional obligations by prioritising health, family, and leisure over work. It puts life ahead of work in the bidirectional interaction of life and work.

Elon Musk has proposed the idea of “Optional Work” within 10-20 Years. He predicts that in the next one to two decades, AI and humanoid robots will be able to perform most tasks. Musk has compared the future of labour to growing your own vegetables in your backyard, rather than buying them. It is a voluntary activity done for pleasure rather than necessity. In this envisioned future, Musk believes that because AI and robots will be able to produce goods and services abundantly, money might become immaterial, and he has become a proponent for a “universal high income” to scaffold the future.