This is an opinion piece by Alex Amouyel, Executive Director of Solve.

How will young people have jobs in the workforce of the future when automation is eliminating entire industries? How can we feed 7.5 billion people today without depleting our planet’s resources? How will women fully participate in the economy when today they are excluded or marginalized in many societies, and when they are consistently underpaid? These are big challenges.

We live in a world that has made tremendous progress in the last century. Reducing extreme poverty, stopping kids from dying from preventable causes, helping children complete primary school. Despite the barrage of everyday headlines and voices saying some (or perhaps many) think it was better before — trendlines do point to real progress.

Progress, however, is uneven. Economic inequality is worsening. Blue collar jobs in developed countries are being eliminated, and soon white collar jobs may very well be eliminated too — sometimes by globalization, often by automation, machine learning, and other technologies.

Image: Adam Schultz.