IB Digital Society 5.1C the Future of Work Notes

5.1C The Future of Work

The Future of Work as a Challenge

1. HL extension content (HL only): how digital systems reshape which jobs exist, how secure and meaningful they are, and who gets to do them.
2. It counts as a challenge because the ground keeps moving: automation and AI change which jobs exist faster than most can retrain, and unevenly (a warehouse worker and a software engineer face very different futures).
3. Key concepts: change (ordinary evolution or a genuine break?) and power (who captures the gains while others absorb the cost?).
4. Approach: examine the challenge through automation, job quality, and reskilling, then weigh interventions by what they do, type, effectiveness, and worth (the Paper 3 judgement).

Automation and Employment

1. Automation, machines and software doing tasks people once did, has reshaped work for centuries; routine, predictable tasks go first (assembly lines, data entry, checkouts).
2. The fresh shift: generative AI now reaches knowledge work (drafting text, writing code, translating, summarising), so jobs once thought safe are in the conversation. The debate feels newly urgent since 2023.
3. Automation rarely deletes a whole job at once; it changes tasks within it, often shifting a worker toward overseeing the machine. Through change, the live question is evolution or transformation; through power, who captures productivity gains is unsettled.
   1. Contested: some roles shrink while many are reshaped and a few new ones appear. It promises less drudgery, but displacement falls hardest on lower-paid workers who scramble to adapt.

Meaningful and Secure Work