9 ways the workplace will look different in 2050 by Melissa Stanger on Jan 20, 2016, 10:42 AM
 Over the years we've seen the workplace go through a number of dramatic changes: The dress code has shifted away from the suit and tie. There are entire jobs devoted only to the strategic use of social media. People are "job hopping" every year or two, rather than committing their careers to one company.
And that's just within the last five or 10 years; imagine how much different it will look several decades from now. Business Insider spoke with a of couple futurists with expertise on the workplace to better understand how it could change by the year 2050. These are only predictions, of course, but given the already rapid pace of change underway thanks to advancements in technology, here are nine very likely scenarios we could see in the next few decades. SEE ALSO: 25 ways the world changed in 2015 NOW READ: 25 jobs that might not be around in the future The corporate ladder could become the "corporate lattice."  In the past 25 years, one-quarter of companies have reduced the number of layers of management they have, moving toward a flatter, more grid-like management structure. We've already seen it in companies like Vegas-based e-commerce site Zappos, which eliminated employee titles just over two years ago in favor of a manager-free "holacracy." "Traditional roles are going to disappear because many workplaces are going to disappear, so the whole structural hierarchical system is going to disappear," said James Canton, PhD, chairman and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures and author of "Future Smart: Managing the Game-Changing Trends that Will Transform Your World." "You'll end up with a system, a network of humans and artificial intelligence, crowd-based intelligence — they're all going to get mashed up."
Artificial intelligence could replace jobs previously held by humans ...  In May, NPR created a digital tool to calculate how likely it is that certain jobs will be taken over by robots 20 years from now. Manual-labor jobs appear to be most at risk, while jobs that require empathy, like social workers and caretakers, are least at risk. "[A University of Oxford report] predicts that by 2030, let alone by 2050, we'll have lost almost 50% of the workforce to artificial intelligence," said David Price, co-founder of cultural-change practice We Do Things Differently and author of "OPEN: How We'll Work, Live and Learn in the Future." The Oxford report, which examined sectors most likely to lose jobs, noted that the transportation and logistics industry was particularly susceptible to upheaval thanks to the development of driverless cars by companies like Google. Even jobs that seemingly require the human touch, like the classroom teacher, are at risk. "We're already seeing experiments with this robot in the classroom, and when you ask kids with autism which one they'd rather be taught by, the teacher or the robot, they pick the robot," Price said.
... but could also create jobs that didn't exist before.  New technology doesn't always mean the loss of jobs. The invention of the printing press actually created a lot of jobs back in the day, said Price, "and we're going to gain jobs as well, but it's guesswork which jobs we'll gain." Canton predicts a scenario in which humans and robots work side-by-side in the future, where new jobs could include operating artificial intelligence-based technology and old jobs could be augmented by it. "We're going to need to train people — whether on the factory floor or in a call center — how to use A.I. smarter," Canton said. "So right now the era of using these knowledge bases is kind of cumbersome, but over the next decades artificial intelligence will sense what somebody is asking a customer and will help the human operator provide better service."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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