There is no such thing as ‘unskilled labour’: Drop its use.

livemint.com:

Labour Day in the US was on 2 September, an appropriate moment to consider the term ‘unskilled.’ Economists have used it for as long as I can remember, and at some point, I became numb to it, thinking it was just a neutral classification. But it’s not neutral—it’s both demeaning and misleading. Often people have incredible skills; they just aren’t skills currently in high demand.

Or they have valuable skills that are abundant relative to demand. Or they simply can’t find a good match between their skills and the market because of where and when they live. No matter how valuable your skills are in the market today, they may or may not be highly valued by the market over the course of your lifetime.

With artificial intelligence (AI) threatening to devalue entire categories of human work, we need to be more purposeful in recognizing a distinction: The market value of a set of skills is not the same as its human value. In other words, a person’s worth is never determined by their potential market wage. The challenge for anyone trying to ensure that society has plenty of jobs that pay a reliable living wage is that any training programme for people can also be used to train artificial intelligence.

If you can think of a specific skill and write down the bullet points of knowledge needed to develop it, an AI program can likely do that, too. Not only can AI pass many college-level courses, it can also pass the bar exam. So, what is left for humans to do? We must invest in our humanity.

At its core, a job has always been about meeting the needs of others. When we were an agrarian society, many jobs centred on meeting the basic need for food. As our economies and our incomes grew, work could expand to meet other needs: for