Writer and academic, Faculty Member at the College of Administrative Studies – Arab Open University, Jordan
Traditional unemployment today results from an increase in the number of job seekers exceeding the labour market's demand for jobs. This is due to several factors, including population growth, a mismatch between job seekers' qualifications and market needs, and weak labour demand caused by slow economic growth, declining overall demand, and low investment in labour-intensive sectors.
Future unemployment, however, will stem from more complex causes. The most prominent will be the superiority of robots over humans in terms of productivity, efficiency, cost, speed, accuracy, and the ability to operate continuously without temporal or spatial limitations. In addition, robots are not constrained by social or ethical limitations, and their maintenance, upgrading, and replacement costs are significantly lower compared to the costs of healthcare, retirement, and employee benefits for human workers. Humans will primarily be limited to servicing robots in terms of programming, maintenance, updating, development, and manufacturing. Robots will become real competitors that outperform human labour.
Another factor that will intensify unemployment in the labour sector is the increasing use of artificial intelligence applications in performing many traditional and simple tasks and jobs that were previously done by humans, but with greater speed, accuracy, efficiency, and productivity. The role of humans in this context will be limited to developing, updating, maintaining, installing, and training AI systems.
Humanity faces critical choices. The simplest may be the ability to compete by transforming into “robot-like humans" who can rival machines, or becoming surplus humans with limited sources of income. This reflects the core idea promoted by some economists about the future need for fewer humans on the planet, where all social and economic values and concepts will change, and emotions and ethics will no longer matter in the face of a rigid machine alternative without identity or human character.
Some may argue that humans will remain superior in terms of thinking, creativity, and traditional manual skills. However, even these areas are increasingly becoming fields of operation for robots and artificial intelligence applications.
Key questions arise today: Will there still be a need for professions such as calligraphers, painters, writers, accountants, financial analysts, teachers, university professors, doctors, engineers, and others, in light of the development of advanced quantum computing and AI systems? Perhaps the only remaining jobs will be those that robots cannot easily perform, such as mechanics, equipment maintenance, child education, and cleaning—tasks that require flexibility, understanding, and mobility that are not easily achievable for robots.
