Can We Predict the Jobs and Skills Needed for the AI Era?

To better plan for the economy of the future, many academics and policymakers regularly attempt to forecast the jobs and worker skills that will be needed going forward. Driving these efforts are fears about how technological automation might disrupt workers, skills, professions, firms and entire industrial sectors. The continued growth of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other computational technologies exacerbate these anxieties.Yet the limits of both our collective knowledge and our individual imaginations constrain well-intentioned efforts to plan for the workforce of the future. Past attempts to assist workers or industries have often failed for various reasons. While dystopian predictions about mass technological unemployment persist, as do retraining or reskilling programs that typically fail to produce much of value for workers or society. As public efforts to assist or train workers move from general to more specific, the potential for policy missteps grows greater. While transitional support mechanisms can help alleviate some of the pain associated with fast-moving technological disruption, the most important thing policymakers can do is clear away barriers to economic dynamism and new opportunities for workers