With daily job losses making headlines and university enrolments dwindling, it’s a question many are asking: What is the future of jobs and how will humans earn a living?
Is a Universal Basic Income, or UBI – a regular payment to all workers – the solution?
The rapid changes coming through AI and the impact on jobs is on a scale never seen before.
In 2023, a study by Goldmans Sachs found the new wave of AI systems could have a major impact on employment markets around the world.
An analysis of 900 occupations found shifts in workflows triggered by these advances could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation.
And a 2026 Boston Consulting Group microeconomic model reveals that over the next two to three years, 50 to 55 per cent of jobs in the US will be reshaped by AI.
Future of jobs and earnings
Dr Nici Sweaney, ethical AI strategist and founder of consultancy AI Her Way, believes AI will change what we do for work, but will not change why we work.
Dr Nici Sweany believes purpose will drive humans. Photo: Supplied
Among her peers, the future of work is absolutely a global concern, she says.
And there are plenty of theories as to how future earnings will play out.
“A welfare floor everyone earns from. A tax on AI and robotics to fund it, or the job dissolving into a set of skills and you hire out piecemeal,” says Sweaney.
Across history, humans have never run out of work but run out of old work, then invent the next kind of work.
A century ago, one third of people worked the land, Sweaney says.
Today it is around two per cent, and yet we do not have 30 per cent plus unemployment because the work shifted to other areas.
“Every leap in technology has done the same thing: it raises the floor, and we climb.
“Automation, technology, and artificial intelligence are not replacing purpose; purpose is exactly what we will always go looking for.”
Change of work shifts
Sarah Bankins, associate professor in ethical AI and work at Macquarie University, says when new technologies arise, it changes the nature of human work, the types of roles available and the skills needed.
Sarah Bankins says humans will continue to add value to workplaces. Photo: Supplied
Historically, technology impacts work in three broad ways: it can replace work that humans do; complement and support human work; and create new forms of work, roles, and occupations – and do it all in combination.
“These transitions are not easy; they take time and can generate feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.
“Humans will continue to bring and add value to workplaces, what that looks like will change over time.
“Right now, we’re in the midst of this.”
However, there is cause for optimism she adds.
The University of Phoenix Career Institute’s Career Optimism Index suggests that workers are increasingly building their AI fluency, often at faster pace than their organisations – ultimately building skills, confidence, and their competitiveness in the labour market.
Born into IT
For someone who has spent nearly four decades immersed in technology, even learning to code as a child, Anna McPhee – author of What Machines Can’t Replace (available in August 2026) – has a healthy respect and concern where tech is going.
For the past nine years she has worked at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com
"I’m a software engineer and I don't think AI is going to take my job anytime soon.
“The more I work with AI, the stronger I feel that way."
It's a position she holds not out of denial, but experience.
Anna McPhee says the speed of change is rapid. Photo: Supplied
She's watched technology transform the industry across multiple cycles of change and reinvention from the arrival of calculators to the rise of the web.
Currently, McPhee sees something both familiar and distinctly different.
Speed of change
The distinction is the speed of change.
“In the past, it took decades for an invention to really come through,” McPhee says.
“Now it's so rapid.”
That speed, she argues, is the real challenge facing the next generation of workers – not AI itself, but the pace at which the landscape shifts beneath their feet.
For entry-level workers and new graduates, she concedes, the road is harder.
"They'll barely finish their degree and one day the job is there, the next it isn't. That's how fast things are going.
“This introduces interesting challenges for younger people coming in."
The answer to the value of work she believes lies in bringing humanness into technology rather than retreating from it, along with finding products and roles that require something a machine cannot replicate.
McPhee belief is AI will not replace creativity.
“Now there’s a lean towards people showing who they’re really about – they’re put off by AI generated images.
“There is value in imperfection.”
Concern for future of jobs has always been there
Dr Ben Spies-Butcher, CEO of independent research outfit Centre for Future Work, understands the anxiety around where the workforce is heading.
The reality, he says, is more people are working, and working over a longer period, than in the past.
There is also no shortage of useful work.
“We don’t have enough nurses or builders. AI should be an opportunity to take the pressure off, work less and have more quality paid work in areas that provide meaning and community.
“If that’s not happening, it’s not because of the technology – it reflects the priorities of those in charge of it.”
Discussions around the end of work comes up frequently over the decades, he says.
John Maynard Keynes, known for his Keynesian economics, predicted we’d be working 15 hours a week by now.
Dr Ben Spies-Butcher says there is no shortage of useful work. Photo: Supplied
“New technologies change work – some jobs disappear, but other are created.
“The benefits of new technology are spread very unevenly. Many technological innovations are designed to disrupt labour markets.”
He points to platform and gig economies.
“Drivers still drive, carers still care. The technology disrupts how they are employed, often undermining pay and conditions.
“Our challenge is ensuring workers have real protections and a real say over how technology is rolled out.”
Value in work lies in purpose
The final word goes to Sweaney who says humans have always needed purpose.
“Work itself will look fundamentally different in time, because that is the nature of progress.
“In the best version of this, the machines take the busywork and hand us back room to do something that matters.”
