Le silence qui suit est lourd, comme si quelqu’un venait d’éteindre la lumière. Les yeux se baissent vers les écrans, vers les mails, vers les to-do listes qui débordent encore. L’idée d’un futur sans travail flotte dans l’air, à la fois tentante et terrifiante.
Un soir récent, dans un train entre Londres et Manchester, j’ai observé une scène minuscule qui ne collait pas à ce récit catastrophe. Une femme d’une quarantaine d’années tenait son téléphone d’une main, son carnet de l’autre. Sur son écran, un tableau Excel rempli de chiffres. Dans son carnet, une liste griffonnée : “clients”, “ateliers”, “projet local”. À la fois salariée, freelance, voisine engagée. Elle jonglait. Elle inventait quelque chose qui ne rentre dans aucune case de contrat classique.
La voix automatique annonçait des retards “dus à des difficultés techniques”. Elle, sans même lever la tête, envoyait un devis, aimait une publication d’une amie qui lançait un café associatif, réservait une place pour une formation en ligne. Rien qui ressemble à un monde “sans travail”. Au contraire : partout, des formes de travail qui débordent du cadre habituel. Et si la vraie histoire commençait là.
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Why predictions of jobless futures keep missing the human point
Every decade has its favourite apocalypse, and right now it’s the “no-jobs-left” one. Economists share charts, futurologists post viral threads, and headlines scream about robots stealing everything. It sounds clean. Binary. Machines win, humans lose. Reality in offices, warehouses, studios and kitchens across the UK is far messier, and far more interesting.
Look closely and you don’t see a cliff edge where work stops. You see a tide line that keeps moving. Tasks shift. Roles blur. What was once a job becomes a button. What was once unpaid emotional graft suddenly becomes a line on an invoice. Humans don’t just “occupy jobs”. We constantly rewrite what work even means.
In 1995, nobody walked into a careers office saying, “I want to become a social media manager.” In 2024, that role is already splitting into creators, community leads, analytics specialists, brand storytellers. Every wave of technology that was supposed to “end work” has mostly ended certain tasks, then freed us to argue over what counts as work next. Predictions about jobless futures skip this awkward, very human part of the story.
Take the endless forecasts about self-driving lorries putting drivers out of work. The narrative is simple: software replaces humans, end of chapter. Yet in logistics hubs from Milton Keynes to Rotterdam, what’s actually happening is stranger. Drivers are retraining as fleet supervisors, tech liaisons, safety monitors, local delivery specialists handling the messy “last mile” that algorithms hate.
One large UK retailer quietly created an internal role called “route empathy lead” during a trial of semi-autonomous vehicles. The job? Understand what routes feel like for humans on the ground, from school runs to tight village corners, and feed that back into planning. It didn’t exist on any labour market chart. But someone got paid for that sensitivity.
Statistically, the pattern repeats. The World Economic Forum estimated that by 2025, automation could displace 85 million jobs globally and create 97 million new ones. Those numbers will age fast, yet the direction matters. We don’t just lose. We reconfigure. Work moves from visible to invisible, from formal to informal, from one payslip to three income streams. The forecasts that scare us most often freeze this moving picture and pretend it’s a still image.
There’s a quieter shift happening in homes, care centres, community projects and online spaces. Activities that were once dismissed as hobbies or “helping out” are slowly being named as work. A daughter managing her dad’s medical appointments on apps. A gamer moderating toxic chat rooms. A neighbour organising a WhatsApp group for elderly residents. None of that showed up in official job statistics until some of it turned into paid roles.
Humans redefine work whenever the old categories stop matching lived reality. That’s what the first coders did when programming was seen as low-status “women’s clerical work”. That’s what influencers did when they turned attention and trust into an income. That’s what climate workers are doing now, stretching “green jobs” to include lawyers, teachers, architects and artists. The economy rarely leads with tidy blueprints; it follows, slightly late, behind human improvisation.
Talk to people between jobs or between identities and a strange clarity appears. A former hospitality manager now runs online cooking experiences for remote teams. A laid-off marketer redesigns CVs on TikTok and calls it “career storytelling”. A retired engineer helps local councils understand flood risks for a small fee and a big sense of responsibility. They are all working, though a machine would struggle to label what exactly it is they do.
This is where the gloomy forecasts stumble. They treat “a job” as a fixed product on a shelf, supplied or removed by technology. In real life, work feels more like a language that adapts to new circumstances. People mix “dialects” of paid, unpaid, formal, grey-area, emotional, creative labour. *The fear of a jobless future comes from staring at job titles, not from listening to what people are already doing with their days.*
How to navigate a future where work keeps changing shape
If work is being redefined underneath us, the most practical move is not to cling harder to one job description. It’s to get very good at describing what you actually do in human terms. Strip the jargon. Name the verbs. Do you calm angry customers? Translate tech into simple words? Spot patterns in chaotic data? Build trust in sceptical teams? That’s your real skillset, beyond any official role.
One simple method: spend ten minutes listing tasks you did this week that weren’t in your job description or contract. Maybe you mentored a new starter, fixed a broken process, wrote an unplanned guide, held space for a colleague in tears. That’s work. It’s also evidence that you know how to step into undefined spaces. Tomorrow’s roles are exactly those undefined spaces, slowly solidifying into titles.
When you gather these stories, patterns appear. Maybe you keep being the bridge between two departments. Maybe people ask you to make sense of spreadsheets. Maybe you’re the one who can host a room so no one feels stupid. That’s where your leverage lives in an AI-heavy world.
An honest truth rarely said aloud: most people don’t sit down every Sunday night with a neat five-year career plan. Life doesn’t move in straight lines. Redundancies happen. Health wobbles. Children arrive. Parents age. The trick is not to chase certainty; it’s to keep a little flexibility alive even when things feel stuck.
One helpful habit is to run tiny “experiments” with work, rather than trying to reinvent everything in a single leap. Offer a workshop to three friends and see if they’d pay a small fee. Volunteer for one project at your council or school and notice what energises you. Post a short thread about what you know on LinkedIn and watch who responds. These are low-risk ways of mapping where your skills still have power in a shifting landscape.
The big mistake many of us make is waiting for an institution to give us a new label before we believe our work counts. Broadcasters did that with podcasters. Universities did that with online course creators. Corporates did that with diversity leads who had been doing the hard work informally for years. The market is slow to recognise new forms of value. Humans aren’t.
“The future of work isn’t about humans competing with machines,” says a London-based labour economist I interviewed recently. “It’s about who gets to define what counts as valuable work in the first place.”
That question isn’t abstract. It trickles down into everyday choices. Who gets paid to moderate your company’s internal chat. Who gets time off for caring responsibilities. Who is allowed to say, “This emotional load is part of my job,” and who is told it’s “just being nice”. If forecasts of jobless futures ignore this politics of recognition, they miss where the real battle sits.
- Map your “invisible work” for one week: emotional labour, community organising, informal mentoring.
- Turn at least one of those recurring activities into a line on your CV or LinkedIn profile.
- Talk about it in terms of outcomes: reduced conflict, smoother onboarding, stronger client loyalty.
- Notice which of these could, in time, become a new job title — and act as if you’re already its first pioneer.
That quiet, sometimes awkward step of claiming your own definition of work is where many new careers quietly begin.
A future of work worth arguing over
The easy story says technology is marching towards a clean, automated economy with barely any humans left inside it. Look around. Cafés full of laptops. Parents juggling Slack with school runs. Retirees managing charity boards from their kitchen tables. Teenagers earning money from editing videos in bedrooms the size of a train compartment. Work is not disappearing. It’s leaking out of the old containers.
Predictions about jobless futures act as if work is a static object that can be switched off by a clever enough machine. Everyday life suggests something else. Work is more like a living negotiation: between what needs doing, what we’re willing to do, and what society agrees to recognise and reward. When those three drift apart, we feel the anxiety. When they align, even briefly, it feels like meaningful work.
So the real question isn’t “Will there be jobs?” It’s “Who gets to shape the new definitions of work that are emerging?” That includes you, your colleagues, your neighbours, your kids. It includes the unions adapting to platform labour and the online communities arguing for fair pay in creative fields. It includes the managers who quietly rewrite job descriptions to fit the humans they already have.
The most useful response to scary headlines might not be panic or denial but curiosity. Where, in your own life, are the early signs of work being redefined? That WhatsApp group you run. That side project you can’t stop thinking about. That boring task you automated for your team last month. Hidden in these small moves is a bigger possibility: a future where we stop letting machines, or markets, have the final word on what counts as real work.
| Point clé | Détail | Intérêt pour le lecteur |
|---|---|---|
| Work keeps changing shape | Jobs vanish, but new forms of work appear in informal, hybrid and digital spaces | Helps you see beyond alarmist headlines about mass unemployment |
| Invisible tasks are real skills | Emotional labour, mentoring and community work can be reframed as valuable expertise | Gives you concrete material to strengthen your career story |
| You can co-define “future work” | Small experiments and self-definition influence how new roles emerge | Offers a sense of agency instead of passive fear about automation |
FAQ :
- Will AI really replace most human jobs?AI will replace tasks inside jobs, especially routine and repetitive ones. Historically, though, new tasks and roles emerge around every major technology shift. The mix of work changes more than the total amount of human activity.
- What kinds of jobs are safest from automation?Roles that blend human trust, ambiguity and creativity are hardest to automate fully: care work, complex negotiations, leadership, creative storytelling, and hands-on trades in messy real-world environments.
- How can I future-proof my career in practical terms?Focus on learning how to learn, telling the story of your skills in plain language, and running small side experiments that stretch you beyond your core job description.
- Does unpaid or informal work really “count”?Yes. It may not show on a payslip, but it often builds skills, networks and credibility. Many future roles grow out of exactly this kind of invisible labour once it’s recognised and named.
- What should I teach my kids about work and automation?Teach them curiosity about tools, comfort with change, and confidence in their own capacity to create value with others — not just to fill a single job title for life.
