9 ms·

"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..." Not sure

"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..." Not sure how's that going to play out for example a welding machine operator can't become a mechanical engineer in a short span of time because those routine jobs are eventually going to be consumed by automated robots, per this study. Why not motivate people to look into alternative booming industries? Healthcare and therapists for example. With aging population, people would require more health therapists and similar service oriented jobs.

aylons 10y ago
And for a welding operator to become a physical therapist is an even larger leap. Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).
- knieveltech 10y ago
  Hard to have much sympathy for someone who's strangling themselves with their own gender stereotypes.
  - kamau 10y ago
    Often times it's not the worker that strangle themselves. I remember reading some years ago (can't remember where) about the struggles that male nurses have. Male patients often refuse male nurses as they don't want another male to see their bodies, and female patients will refuse male nurses out of modesty. And, according to the same source the problem only intensifies as the male nurse gets older.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
    Universalize that statement and apply it to X demographic not choosing a STEM degree and you'll find yourself in a struggle session.
    - knieveltech 10y ago
      So alter my statement and get a different meaning and outcome? Right-o.
  - maratd 10y ago
    > strangling themselves with their own gender stereotypes Those stereotypes exist for a reason. No matter how much you pretend otherwise, differences between men and women exist. That's why we refer to one as men and one as women. Because they're different. They will naturally gravitate toward specific industries and tasks. Lecturing people because of their natural preferences is juvenile.
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    it may be hard but you should do it. everyone is hurt by misogyny, not just women, and often it's through a narrowing what is seen as possible.
- vostok 10y ago
  Are there any programs to help get men into nursing and similar professions? That seems like a great idea.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  My brother recently finished nursing school. The number of times he got the question, "you're gonna be a male nurse?" ... He had a number of cute responses.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    The prejudice and stereotyping here is ridiculous, but honestly, I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate". The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we talk to doctors.
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      I agree with the idea that utilizing highly-trained physicians for basic health care is a misallocation of resources. Nurse practitioners and physician associates [0] should and have been receiving more autonomy in providing basic care. They have enough training to do so, and should be capable of recognizing when a referral is required. [0] Also known as "physician assistant", which is a terrible name when making a case for autonomy...
    - kwhitefoot 10y ago
      What's wrong with nurse? It has a quite specific meaning. Changing it medical associate just makes it less precise. What's needed is for sexism to be eradicated everywhere; changing the names is not going to do that.
      - pasquinelli 10y ago
        i agree that sexism needs to be eradicated everywhere, and i don't honestly believe shuffling terminology is a very significant move, but to be fair the word nurse is a gendered one: besides meaning to care for someone, it also refers to the same general concept in a more specific circumstance, that is, breastfeeding.
      - 10y ago
- VLM 10y ago
  There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side. Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc. Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ... We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now. So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts. A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
metaphorm 10y ago
elder-care cannot possibly be a solid basis for the economy. they are not in their working years and are not (on the average) contributing positive sums to GDP or tax revenue. there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy. It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.
- beguiledfoil 10y ago
  >but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan). >It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. This is word soup.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse. you're misusing the term in an effort to beat me down with the force of your snark. cut it out. do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup. Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increased demand for positions like that in our economy but that is indicative of economic dysfunction, not economic health. Some industries are declining (in terms of labor force participation) because of off-shoring and automation. Those industries are benefiting in profitability from the reduction of their labor costs but the laborers being displaced are not receiving those benefits. New industries that can offer work for displaced laborers are needed. Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).
syshum 10y ago
Healthcare is not immune from Automation either. there is huge efforts underway to replace Doctors, Nurses, etc with AI.
- pm90 10y ago
  The current demand for healthcare is just phenomenal, with the supply barely meeting it in developed countries, and not so much in developing countries. Automation will most likely make it possible to have better skill division. e.g. a heart surgeon from the US could operate on a patient in Gambia, remotely. It seems unlikely that AI/automation would replace the surgeon altogether, at least in the next couple of decades (perhaps in the next 100 years, if we don't manage to kill of our species).
  - syshum 10y ago
    Surgeons are but one small and very specialized part of the Health Industry, just because Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) does not mean the other jobs in Healthcare are as immune, GP's, Nurses, Lab Techs, etc are all targets. the comment I replied to was wanting to take People in Job A, and retrain them for Job B in healthcare as a second career do to Job A being automated. You are not likly to be a Surgeon as a Second Career unless you are already a non-surgical doctor. You are not going to take a welder and make them a Surgeon as a second career most likely. As such it was implied that Healthcare was a "safe" industry for people seeking refuge from having their jobs automated away. I was pointing out it is not.
    - gspetr 10y ago
      > Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) Which part would you like to debate? Is it the "soon" part or do you believe the Surgeon role will be gone entirely? Even with significant AI advances I'd argue that a Surgeon will still retain at least a guiding role (i.e. what to cut and what to do in case of complications) to the machine.
      - 10y ago
nickthemagicman 10y ago
Engineering and Medecine seem to be the only safe places atm.
- SolaceQuantum 10y ago
  I don't know about that. Among my peers that went into engineering there are concerns of a shrinking job market for specific specialties like civil engineering or chemical engineering...
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Can you elaborate why that's the case?
- vostok 10y ago
  Traditional elite jobs such as sales, banking (not trading), and management seem to have also resisted automation for the time being.
  - ska 10y ago
    None of those jobs are categorically elite - they have a small fraction of elite positions. One plausible scenario is that in a lot of areas the "elite" positions will stay somewhat stable, but there will be a huge drop in demand for 2nd tier and below.
    - ska 10y ago
      Also note that this could have a deep effect in itself though. Consider that for every biglaw partner there are what, 1000s of other lawyers? But every one of those partners came up in a cohort of at least dozens if not hundreds who dropped out along the way. And those are just the ones that made it through the first filters. Without the work to support and train on a pyramid like this, they'll have to find a new scheme to decide who rises to the top.
  - monknomo 10y ago
snarf21 10y ago
You are exactly right. Who is going to take care of all these people as they age? (Huge problem in Japan right now. They are basically paying people to have kids because they know they'll be needing population to fill that role). People taking care of other people is going to be harder to automate than shipping and logistics. But still there is going to be cost/wage differences between companions vs light nursing (shower, etc.) vs full nursing .... You can't pay a high school graduate the same as a CPRN, and they have different skills/applications. The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it. I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.
- rokosbasilisk 10y ago
  Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.

aylons 10y ago

And for a welding operator to become a physical therapist is an even larger leap. Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).

knieveltech 10y ago
Hard to have much sympathy for someone who's strangling themselves with their own gender stereotypes.
- kamau 10y ago
  Often times it's not the worker that strangle themselves. I remember reading some years ago (can't remember where) about the struggles that male nurses have. Male patients often refuse male nurses as they don't want another male to see their bodies, and female patients will refuse male nurses out of modesty. And, according to the same source the problem only intensifies as the male nurse gets older.
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  Universalize that statement and apply it to X demographic not choosing a STEM degree and you'll find yourself in a struggle session.
  - knieveltech 10y ago
    So alter my statement and get a different meaning and outcome? Right-o.
- maratd 10y ago
  > strangling themselves with their own gender stereotypes Those stereotypes exist for a reason. No matter how much you pretend otherwise, differences between men and women exist. That's why we refer to one as men and one as women. Because they're different. They will naturally gravitate toward specific industries and tasks. Lecturing people because of their natural preferences is juvenile.
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  it may be hard but you should do it. everyone is hurt by misogyny, not just women, and often it's through a narrowing what is seen as possible.
vostok 10y ago
Are there any programs to help get men into nursing and similar professions? That seems like a great idea.
dllthomas 10y ago
My brother recently finished nursing school. The number of times he got the question, "you're gonna be a male nurse?" ... He had a number of cute responses.
- tptacek 10y ago
  The prejudice and stereotyping here is ridiculous, but honestly, I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate". The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we talk to doctors.
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    I agree with the idea that utilizing highly-trained physicians for basic health care is a misallocation of resources. Nurse practitioners and physician associates [0] should and have been receiving more autonomy in providing basic care. They have enough training to do so, and should be capable of recognizing when a referral is required. [0] Also known as "physician assistant", which is a terrible name when making a case for autonomy...
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    What's wrong with nurse? It has a quite specific meaning. Changing it medical associate just makes it less precise. What's needed is for sexism to be eradicated everywhere; changing the names is not going to do that.
    - pasquinelli 10y ago
      i agree that sexism needs to be eradicated everywhere, and i don't honestly believe shuffling terminology is a very significant move, but to be fair the word nurse is a gendered one: besides meaning to care for someone, it also refers to the same general concept in a more specific circumstance, that is, breastfeeding.
    - 10y ago
VLM 10y ago
There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side. Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc. Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ... We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now. So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts. A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.

metaphorm 10y ago

elder-care cannot possibly be a solid basis for the economy. they are not in their working years and are not (on the average) contributing positive sums to GDP or tax revenue. there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy. It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.

beguiledfoil 10y ago
>but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan). >It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. This is word soup.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse. you're misusing the term in an effort to beat me down with the force of your snark. cut it out. do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup. Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increased demand for positions like that in our economy but that is indicative of economic dysfunction, not economic health. Some industries are declining (in terms of labor force participation) because of off-shoring and automation. Those industries are benefiting in profitability from the reduction of their labor costs but the laborers being displaced are not receiving those benefits. New industries that can offer work for displaced laborers are needed. Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).

syshum 10y ago

Healthcare is not immune from Automation either. there is huge efforts underway to replace Doctors, Nurses, etc with AI.

pm90 10y ago
The current demand for healthcare is just phenomenal, with the supply barely meeting it in developed countries, and not so much in developing countries. Automation will most likely make it possible to have better skill division. e.g. a heart surgeon from the US could operate on a patient in Gambia, remotely. It seems unlikely that AI/automation would replace the surgeon altogether, at least in the next couple of decades (perhaps in the next 100 years, if we don't manage to kill of our species).
- syshum 10y ago
  Surgeons are but one small and very specialized part of the Health Industry, just because Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) does not mean the other jobs in Healthcare are as immune, GP's, Nurses, Lab Techs, etc are all targets. the comment I replied to was wanting to take People in Job A, and retrain them for Job B in healthcare as a second career do to Job A being automated. You are not likly to be a Surgeon as a Second Career unless you are already a non-surgical doctor. You are not going to take a welder and make them a Surgeon as a second career most likely. As such it was implied that Healthcare was a "safe" industry for people seeking refuge from having their jobs automated away. I was pointing out it is not.
  - gspetr 10y ago
    > Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) Which part would you like to debate? Is it the "soon" part or do you believe the Surgeon role will be gone entirely? Even with significant AI advances I'd argue that a Surgeon will still retain at least a guiding role (i.e. what to cut and what to do in case of complications) to the machine.
    - 10y ago

nickthemagicman 10y ago

Engineering and Medecine seem to be the only safe places atm.

SolaceQuantum 10y ago
I don't know about that. Among my peers that went into engineering there are concerns of a shrinking job market for specific specialties like civil engineering or chemical engineering...
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Can you elaborate why that's the case?
vostok 10y ago
Traditional elite jobs such as sales, banking (not trading), and management seem to have also resisted automation for the time being.
- ska 10y ago
  None of those jobs are categorically elite - they have a small fraction of elite positions. One plausible scenario is that in a lot of areas the "elite" positions will stay somewhat stable, but there will be a huge drop in demand for 2nd tier and below.
  - ska 10y ago
    Also note that this could have a deep effect in itself though. Consider that for every biglaw partner there are what, 1000s of other lawyers? But every one of those partners came up in a cohort of at least dozens if not hundreds who dropped out along the way. And those are just the ones that made it through the first filters. Without the work to support and train on a pyramid like this, they'll have to find a new scheme to decide who rises to the top.
- monknomo 10y ago

snarf21 10y ago

You are exactly right. Who is going to take care of all these people as they age? (Huge problem in Japan right now. They are basically paying people to have kids because they know they'll be needing population to fill that role). People taking care of other people is going to be harder to automate than shipping and logistics. But still there is going to be cost/wage differences between companions vs light nursing (shower, etc.) vs full nursing .... You can't pay a high school graduate the same as a CPRN, and they have different skills/applications. The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it. I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.

rokosbasilisk 10y ago
Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.