Metis Study Association

The Academic Committee and Metis are excited to invite you to the second speaker series event of the academic year which will focus on the “Future of Jobs”. The event will be held on the 13th of January 2021 from 17:00 till 18:15 p.m. and it will be led by Pr. Anna Salomons and Huub Brouwer. 

THE SPEAKERS:
Professor Salomons is a Professor of Employment and Inequality at Utrecht University’s School of Economics in the Netherlands whose research focuses on the labor market impacts of advancing technology. Pr. Salomons’ presentation will cover the importance of new job types (‘new work’) that emerges as automation subsumes existing labor tasks. She will use evidence from an inventory of new job titles from the United States Census microdata over 1940-2018 and the relative emergence and evolution of new work—including its skill demands and wage levels. Pr. Salomons will thus argue that new work emerges disproportionately in activities where old work is also growing and thus present a high-level hypothesis on the future of new work creation. 

Huub Brouwer is an assistant professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Tilburg University and a postdoctoral research fellow at Utrecht University, whose research focuses on moral and political philosophy. In this speaker series, he will cover the case for maximum income policies by using normative political theory in attempting to answer the question: “What, if anything, can justify a maximum income?”. Brouwer will make use of Rawlsian egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and desertism—the three prominent approaches to taxation and justice in contemporary political philosophy—to prove his thesis. He will contrast their support for relative and absolute maximum income policies, eventually demonstrating that the convergence of these theories strengthens the case for such policies.

 
THE THEME:
How will the current work scene change in the coming decades? How does automation not necessarily correlate to fewer jobs? Is “new work” creation significantly increasing, and why? How can better income improve the effectiveness of future jobs? 
High-tech innovations such as AIs and drones prove that technology has an ever-growing potential to recreate human behavior perfectly. This affects every aspect of human life, and thus will most definitely have an effect on the future of work. The historical and social perspective of Pr. Salomons on the evolution of “new work” in addition to Brouwer’s political-philosophical perspective on changing the conditions of work attempt to create a futuristic image of what work will become with the passing of time.