Technological unemployment

Abstract

Policy-makers need to embrace openness and make education affordable and accessible and also profitable for institutions in an open higher education ecosystem. With technology advancing at a geometric pace, robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D-printing, and other innovations with enormous disruptive potential will soon hit the mainstream. Technological unemployment is undoubtedly an impending problem that will create greater inequalities and an increasing gap between the returns to labour and the returns to capital. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, wrote the underlying paper for the economic summit at Davos 2016, profiling what he calls ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’. The speed of technological ‘breakthrough’, Schwab argues, has no historical precedent, connecting billions of people through mobile devices that have unprecedented processing power, storage and unlimited access to knowledge. At a time when technological change is happening even faster, a main hurdle for workers to adapt is thus the surging costs of education.