AI development may eliminate human jobs

The industrial development brought the development of machines, many of which rendered some jobs obsolete. With the development of artificial intelligence, analysts are forecasting that jobs that require complex knowledge such as lawyers and policy analysts will no longer be done by humans in the future.

A new report issued by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning suggests this might be the scenario for Korea in 10 years.

“During the World Economic Forum in 2016, a report titled The Future of Jobs estimated that by 2020, about 7.1 million jobs will go obsolete while 2.0 million new jobs will be created,” said the Science Ministry’s report, “Korea after 10 years, finding a path for future jobs,” which was published Wednesday.

The report details how new jobs that didn’t exist just 10 years ago have become some of the most popular occupations today, such as big data analyst and cloud-computing specialist. It added that while people will be switching jobs constantly, each job will have specialties.

This means workers with diverse expertise will be cooperating based on the needs of the projects, rather than based on their employers. A company’s role in the future will be a medium that connects people with different projects, rather than a workplace in which people gather to work together as one entity.

In 10 years, we’ll also see the “polarization in jobs and wages.” With the development of AI and robots, the number of jobs that require middle skills, such as sales, will shrink. And since it is difficult to move up from middle skill jobs to highly-skilled jobs, those workers will end up in lower-paying positions, extending the labor gap.

“We have to prepare ourselves for the future job market through customized education and variation of occupations, along with the establishment of social safety nets,” said Lee Seung-kyu, a researcher at the Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning.

BY CHOI HYUNG-JO, MOON HEE-CHUL [choi.hyungjo@joongang.co.kr]