Tag: displaced workers

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future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The 92 Million We’re Not Talking About

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The World Economic Forum puts a number on it: 92 million jobs displaced by 2030. Not restructured. Not reimagined. Gone. It shows up in reports the way a weather forecast does—clinical, a little boring, easy to skim past. But the number has already started collecting people.

The middle manager let go last spring after her company switched to an AI workflow system—she’s in it. So is the paralegal who spent a decade becoming indispensable at document review. The radiologist whose reads are now double-checked by software that doesn’t sleep or bill hourly. The customer service rep who spent months training a chatbot, then got his walking papers. None of them were warned. The future didn’t send a memo.

What surprises me isn’t the displacement itself. Economies have always churned through people. What surprises me is the story we’ve agreed to tell about it.

And that is why I’ve decided to focus on The Relevance Gap.

Continue reading… “The 92 Million We’re Not Talking About”
future predictions, future report, future scenario, future tech

The Dwindling: How the Workforce Hollows Out

The Last Shift — Column 3

By Futurist Thomas Frey

There’s a town in northeastern Ohio — one of dozens like it — where the biggest employer used to be a stamping plant that made parts for cars. At its peak, 1,400 people worked there. It was the kind of job you didn’t need a degree for but could raise a family on. Union wages, pension, health insurance, a sense that if you showed up and worked hard, the future was reasonably predictable.

The plant didn’t close. It automated.

Today it employs 340 people. It produces more parts than it ever did. The town, meanwhile, has been slowly hollowing out for fifteen years. The hardware store is gone. The diner is gone. The high school graduated 60 kids last year, down from 230 in 2005. The ones who could leave, left. The ones who stayed are figuring out what a town does when its reason for existing has been handed to a machine.

This is what displacement looks like when it isn’t on the news.

Continue reading… “The Dwindling: How the Workforce Hollows Out”
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