Have you heard that most of the jobs being created in the economy these days are part-time? No? Good. Yes, you have? Sorry, your info's out of date.

It was true last year, but not this year. As this week's figures for the labour force from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed, of the 176,000 additional jobs created in the first six months of this year, 93 per cent were full-time.

That, BTW, was an exceptionally rapid annualised rate of growth of 2.9 per cent. Doesn't sound like the economy's dead yet.

Admittedly, it was a very different story last year. The calendar year saw growth in total employment of just 100,000 jobs – a very weak 0.8 per cent – of which 135 per cent were part-time.

Huh? Think about it: there must have been a fall of 35,000 in the number of full-time jobs. And there was.

It was a particularly bad year, and with all the happy scare stories about the rise of the "gig economy" it was enough to convince a lot of education-leavers that their chances of ever getting a decent, full-time job were low.

Moral: don't count your nightmares before they've hatched.

David Gruen, a deputy secretary in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, noted in a speech this week that "the displacement of jobs by technology ... is one of the developments that is leading to a sense of unease among many in the community."

People may fear that their own job may be taken over by a machine, or worry there'll be insufficient meaningful jobs for their kids.

Maybe, maybe not. Before we leap to cataclysmic conclusions, Gruen reminds us that fears of technological advances rendering many jobs obsolete is an idea with a long pedigree – back to the Luddites going around smashing machines in the early 1800s.

In the 200 years since then, employers have never ceased seeking out the newest and best labour-saving technology, but so far this has failed to cause mass unemployment.

Coming to today, Gruen says there's little sign of a quickening in the rate of change in occupations that might signal big, new technology-driven changes in the labour market. Nor is there any sign of the rapid improvement in the productivity of labour that you'd expect to see if there was widespread replacement of workers with machines.

Routine or predictable tasks are more susceptible to displacement than non-routine tasks.

David Gruen

But what's been clear for some time, he says, is that jobs across the economy are not equally susceptible to being displaced by technology and automation.

"Routine or predictable tasks are more susceptible to displacement than non-routine tasks. This observation applies to both manual and cognitive tasks – whether manual or cognitive, routine tasks are easier to automate than non-routine ones."

Alex Heath, of the Reserve Bank, has used the ABS' figures on workers by occupation to see how these distinctions have affected our workforce over the 30 years to 2016.

She finds no sign of a recent quickening in the pace of change in occupations but she certainly does find such change over the 30 years since 1986.

As I read her graph, the proportion of routine manual jobs (such as labourers and machinery operators) in total employment has fallen from 40 per cent to 30 per cent, while the proportion of routine cognitive jobs (such as salespeople and clerical workers) has fallen from 27 per cent to 23 per cent.

Non-routine manual jobs on the rise

In contrast, the number of non-routine manual jobs (such as nurses and hospitality workers) has risen from 6 per cent to 11 per cent, with non-routine cognitive jobs (such as management and professional occupations) rising from 27 per cent to 36 per cent.

This means routine jobs' total share of the workforce fell by 14 percentage points, whereas non-routine jobs' share rose by 1-43 points.

This may surprise: the share of routine and non-routine manual jobs fell by 5 percentage points, meaning the share of all cognitive jobs rose by the same.

(If you're wondering, over that 30-year period, total employment grew by almost 5 million jobs – an increase of more than 70 per cent – with the extra jobs spread about equally between part-time and full-time.)

Two trends

Gruen says we should expect these trends to continue. But he makes a point first made by American economist Daron Acemoglu, that there's not one big trend going on in the workplace, but two.

The one that gets all the headlines is automation – jobs being taken over by machines. But the trend that gets much less notice – thus contributing to the public's excessive anxiety – is the continuous creation of new, useful, complex (that is, non-routine) jobs.

We've seen that, for at least the past 30 years in Oz, both trends have been at work. One displacing jobs, the other creating them. And so far, their effect on the composition of jobs has been roughly equal, and hasn't prevented continued growth in the total number of jobs.

Hard to automate

Of course, it remains possible that the digital revolution will cause an acceleration in trend of displacement of jobs by machines, thus overwhelming the creation of new, complex jobs.

But another American economist, David Autor, has explained that certain tasks are particularly hard to automate.

These are tasks "that people understand tacitly and accomplish effortlessly, but for which neither computer programmers nor anyone else can enunciate the explicit 'rules' or procedures ... [The] tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment and common sense – skills that we understand only tacitly".

'Machine learning'

Of course, it's possible that "machine learning" may overcome these problems, but there's another constraint on machines taking all our jobs away to remember: the need for interpersonal skills in a growing number of jobs and our human preference for being served or helped by humans, not robots.

Don't discount the human factor.

Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.