Changing Jobs: The Fair Go in the Machine Age, by Jim Chalmers and Mike Quigley

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A politician and a professor examine what the future of work in the machine age might look like. Tempered and sensible analysis.

How much will technology transform the way we work in Australia and how should we respond to the challenge? What jobs will remain, what new jobs will be created and which jobs will cease to exist? Who will be the winners and losers? These are some of the questions that Jim Chalmers (Labor MP and Shadow Minister for Finance) and Mike Quigley (former telecommunications industry leader and now professor in the School of Computing and Communications at UTS) attempt to answer in Changing Jobs: The Fair Go in the Machine Age.

Predictions for the future of work in the machine age generally look pretty dire. Even optimistic predictions have a depressing effect, as there are always losers in any technological transformation. Best case scenarios could include large pockets of unemployment. Chalmers and Quigley sift through the various studies on employment trends, from the most pessimistic (up to 50 percent unemployment) to the fairly optimistic (no real change at all), and come out somewhere in the middle. They argue that, unemployment predictions aside, technology will definitely change the way we work. This will mean we will all need to concentrate on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. Especially mathematics.

Education will play a big part in this technological revolution. Chalmers and Quigley offer many policy recommendations for improving our mathematical skills, but essentially, they argue we will all have to take a greater interest in our education. We will all need to become ‘computational thinkers’, roughly meaning we will have to think more like algorithms.

Government will also need to provide policy responses that help us train for work and provide a safety net where needed. Changing Jobs provides some 33 policy recommendations, all of which seem pretty sensible and none too radical. (The authors outright reject introducing a universal basic wage, an idea that is gaining interest in some quarters.)

Technology has improved everyone’s lives, but ironically the future as painted in these books on the future of work is often quite depressing. It makes for anxious reading. It makes you wonder if your job is safe. Should I be retraining now? What if I do and my training is suddenly rendered obsolete? Should I even be worried about the predictions of economists and technologists?

Changing Jobs offers much food for thought, with analysis that is tempered and sensible. It recommends that we at least start to seriously think about these issues and prepare for an uncertain future.

Changing Jobs: The Fair Go in the Machine Age, by Jim Chalmers and Mike Quigley. Published by Black Inc. ISBN: 9781863959445 RRP: $22.99

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