The increase of WFH jobs will not create a new class system but, it will transform the Middle Class as we knew it.
Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash
What we are experiencing in the Present is exactly what Alvin Toffler forecast in Future Shock and Powershift. The Industrial Park of the 20th Century spawned the Middle Class. These were the people who served industry as “middlemen”. They linked producers with consumers; they linked government agencies with the people they served; they linked educators with students; they linked doctors with patients; they linked civil service with the military service; and they linked financial resources with investors.
In the 21st Century, most of these Middle Class careers are giving way to AI-guided automation. Unlike the geophysically constrained tasks in the Industrial Park, the middleman tasks in the Global Village have no geophysical limits. They can be handled remotely from anywhere. This does not mean that all these Middle Class careers go away. It means that they will be repurposed. Some will be employed to develop the SW applications required to track transactions; others will be employed to implement these applications on a global scale; and still others will be employed to maintain them. All will be hired as independent contractors who will negotiate their payment based on their value rating. Some will easily command a 5-star fee, others will garner average fees. Most will remain in the middle and that will define the Middle Class of the 21st Century.
The
human economy is not going to disappear completely by 2030, but the autonomous economy is going to eat into it more and more
each year. Robotics are going to displace manual labor and data driven decision-making.
AI enabled smart contracts are going to replace intelligent labor, such
as lawyers, accountants, third party intermediaries, data entry
positions, and insurance adjusters. It’s just the beginning too, as an
immense amount of developers are likely to start flocking towards
developing AI algorithms and smart contracts. The more people that get
involved, the more velocity the movement picks up.
