Buổi 47: Reading – Multiple choice + short-answer: công việc là tập hợp nhiệm vụ

Jobs as bundles of tasks

(Bài đọc tự viết; công ty và nhân vật là giả định.)

A Predictions that machines will make human workers unnecessary are not new. Similar fears accompanied the spread of factory machinery in the nineteenth century, and they returned with the arrival of computers in offices. Each time, some occupations shrank dramatically, yet overall employment did not collapse. This history does not prove that the future will repeat the past, but it does suggest that confident forecasts of mass unemployment deserve careful scrutiny.

B One reason such forecasts often miss the mark is that they treat a job as a single, indivisible thing that is either automated or not. In practice, most jobs are bundles of tasks. An accountant, for instance, may spend part of the day entering figures, part checking unusual transactions, and part explaining results to clients. Technology may take over the first of these almost entirely while leaving the others largely untouched. Analysing work task by task, rather than job by job, therefore gives a more realistic picture: few occupations are likely to disappear completely, but very many are likely to change.

C Which tasks are most exposed? Historically, the answer has been routine ones – tasks that follow clear, predictable steps, whether physical, like sorting parcels, or mental, like processing standard forms. Recent advances have complicated this picture, since some systems can now produce text or analyse images in ways that were once thought to require human understanding. Even so, tasks that involve dealing with unpredictable situations, exercising judgement where the stakes are high, or building trust with other people remain considerably harder to automate. It is in these areas that human workers are likely to keep their advantage, at least for the foreseeable future.

D Whether a new technology displaces workers or complements them depends partly on how organisations choose to use it. Consider the case of Delta Freight, a hypothetical logistics firm. When it introduced software to plan delivery routes, managers faced a choice. They could reduce the number of planners, or they could ask the existing planners to handle exceptions – road closures, urgent orders, customer complaints – that the software could not. Delta chose the second path. The planners’ work became less repetitive and more varied, and the company found it could handle a larger volume of orders without hiring more staff. The software, in other words, augmented the planners rather than replacing them.

E Such outcomes are not automatic. They depend on workers having the skills to take on the new tasks, and on employers being willing to invest in training. Where neither condition is met, the same technology may simply eliminate positions. For this reason, many economists argue that the greatest risk is not a shortage of work in general but a mismatch: jobs may be available, but not for the people whose previous tasks have been automated, or not in the places where they live.

F There is also the question of oversight. As automated systems take on more decisions, someone must check that those decisions are sensible, fair and lawful. This creates new tasks – monitoring, auditing, correcting errors – that did not previously exist. Critics point out that these roles may be fewer in number than the ones they replace, and that they often require higher qualifications. Supporters reply that the same was said of earlier technologies, which eventually generated occupations no one had foreseen.

G What, then, can individuals do? The writer’s view is that there is no single safe career. A more useful strategy is to look at one’s own work as a set of tasks and ask which of them are routine and which depend on judgement, creativity or relationships. Strengthening the second group, and being prepared to retrain when the first group shrinks, is unlikely to guarantee security. But it is probably the most realistic way of making change work in one’s favour.