Many of us have already lost the “race against the machines” — we just don’t know it yet. That is the conclusion of new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Unlike most studies into the impact of automation, this one does not rely on informed guesswork about what machines will be able to do in 20 years’ time. Instead it takes three core skills that three-quarters of us use every day in our work — literacy, numeracy and problem-solving with computers — and compares our performance against the abilities of machines. The results are sobering, but rather than a reason to despair, they suggest we might want to rethink the race altogether.
The OECD has a good idea of our proficiency in these areas because it has put 216,000 adults in 40 countries through a 50-minute assessment called the Survey of Adult Skills. In the survey a group of computer scientists was given the same test and asked which questions computers could answer, using technology that exists but has not necessarily been rolled out yet in the workplace. The conclusion? Almost a third of workers use these cognitive skills daily in their jobs and yet their competency levels have already been matched by computers. About 44 per cent are still better than the machines. The remaining 25 per cent have jobs that do not use these skills every day.