Technequality: a Look into the Future

We are in the middle of a technological revolution, that’s not news. There is a lot of talk about the consequences for the labour market and perhaps for your work. Yet little is said about how we can prepare now for the post-revolution era. Prof. Dr. Mark Levels is researching this with his European research group Technequality. He is professor of Health, Education and Work at Maastricht University and in that capacity leads the Technequality project. The research group has a clear goal: “to understand how technological innovation affects work, education and inequality”.

A large part of the challenge we face as a society is the make or buy principle. When jobs change due to a revolution, the question is always whether you will retrain and train employees, or let them go, and look for new employees. Mark has a clear preference for retraining and training but indicates that the solution is actually one step earlier. “We are not sure which jobs are going to disappear,” says Mark, but it is certain that jobs are going to disappear. For example, if we change our education system now, we will soon reap the benefits and retraining becomes part of the work system.

“The trick is: how do we ensure that we as an economy benefit as much as possible from the potential productivity growth that automation enables, while mitigating the social consequences as much as possible,” said Mark. In the podcast with BNR Newsradio, he explains that this will continue by thinking about the situation in the future, in which it becomes clear that there are differences in how hard people are going to be hit. This creates new types of inequality, which we can still partly prevent.

Listen to the full podcast with Mark Levels, hosted by Wendy van Ierschot from BNR News Radio.

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