Jobs Not Yet Named: What History Says About Tomorrow's Work

About 60% of American employment in 2018 was in job titles that did not exist in 1940. That is the estimate of David Autor and his colleagues in a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2024. A title such as "app developer" is a close example: ask a worker a century ago what it meant and he would not have understood.

What do the studies say about the losses?

The press usually repeats one figure: the 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, which estimated that about 47% of American employment is "at risk". Precision matters here. The study estimated the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, that is, how susceptible occupations are, not how many jobs will actually disappear.

The World Economic Forum's 2025 report on jobs (The Future of Jobs Report), a survey of more than a thousand employers across 55 economies, sets out both sides. By 2030, employers expect new jobs equal to 14% of current employment (170 million) and displaced jobs equal to 8% (92 million), a net growth of 78 million jobs. These are estimates built on participants' expectations, not events that have occurred.

Why do jobs get created?

In his 2015 paper, Autor argues that automation substitutes for human labour in some tasks but also complements it and raises demand for it, and that workers hold a comparative advantage in problem-solving, adaptability and creativity. The 2022 study supports this: new work arose where innovations complemented human labour, not where they replaced it.

A recent example comes from customer-service centres. In a study of 5,179 agents, a generative assistant raised their productivity by about 14%, and by about 34% for the least experienced. The tool changed how the work was done, and in this experiment it did not remove the need for the agent.

Where are the rising jobs likely to be?

What follows is an editorial classification for orientation, not statistics: four settings in which roles are likely to grow.

• Operating and reviewing AI: supported by the fact that "AI and machine learning specialists" and "big data specialists" are among the fastest-growing jobs in the Forum's report.
• Governance and trust: auditing systems, protecting privacy and managing compliance. This is our inference from the widening use of such systems, not a published figure.
• Work built on human presence: such as care, teaching and guidance, which are less likely to be replaced entirely.
• Sector fusion: health, agriculture, energy and education, where domain expertise meets the tool.

Beyond the first, these are reasonable but unmeasured here, so treat them only as hypotheses.

The real problem: the gap

A positive global net means nothing to someone who lost his job this month. In the Forum's survey, 63% of employers see skills gaps as a major barrier to transformation in their organisations, and 85% plan to prioritise upskilling their workforce. The struggle is over time and skill: how long the transition takes, and who pays for retraining.

In Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Education announced that the SAMAI initiative, launched by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, had trained more than one million citizens. It is a step in this direction, though its effect on the labour market needs independent measurement.

What can be done?

1. Review your tasks, not your job title. Which of your tasks are routine and open to assistance, and which need judgement and trust?
2. Keep learning. Employers in the Forum's survey expect 39% of current skills to be transformed or become outdated by 2030.
3. Build bridges for transition. Funded, targeted retraining programmes for those whose occupations are fading.

No one crosses this transition alone; by relying on God while taking the means, one learns, teaches and strengthens those around him. The most honest question for tomorrow is not how many jobs we will lose, but how we prepare people for what is being born.