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The Future of Work Is Uncertain, Schools Should Worry Now

briga 9y ago
Sure jobs are going to disappear, but with each new generation of technology new jobs are created. My job as a web developer didn't exist 30 years ago, and who knows, it might not exist any more 30 years from now. Labor markets evolve as technologies evolve, we just have to teach our children to be adaptable. As far as retail/service jobs go, I think enough people value human communication that we're not going to see a total robot takeover in these areas. People are going to want to go to 'premium' places that employ humans just like people are willing to pay extra for organic groceries.
- senectus1 9y ago
  Also I have to believe that there is a "robot critical mass" that will top out fairly quickly. Robots are expensive, to be able to afford them you need to have customers that can afford to buy them. They will only be able to afford them if they have enough work to earn the money to buy them.... I just dont forsee the "jobs apocalypse" that the dog whistlers seem to fear.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Robots have high capital costs, but are cheaper than workers in the US. A single robot is roughly equal to 3 workers since it can operate 24/7 and even if your humans only cost $5/hr, 3 humans would cost you $30k/yr before you even get to health insurance or payroll taxes. God forbid you have workers in Seattle, SF, NYC, etc where you would triple that number again.
    - itronitron 9y ago
      i wonder how much companies that own and use robots pay annually to insure them
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Also, some companies (Knightscope comes to mind) lease their robots at hourly rates, so the companies replacing workers don't even need to have the capital themselves.
justanotherjoe 9y ago
I see no data to support such a 'disruption'. On a related note why is everywhere i look it's people freaking out over AI. Even the title of the article is telling me to start worrying.
Zarath 9y ago
It seems to bizarre to me that of all the potential problems with AI, people seem to focus on employment. Like seriously, if we create AI good enough to displace a majority of humans from employment, I feel like we may have other things to worry about.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  You are probably talking about something else, but the worrying should be about wealth distribution after the robots (eventually) take over. No more 'normal' employment can and should be seen as a positive for humanity but not if the production is owned by a handful of people. To me that seems more dangerous than the chance of Terminators roaming the streets.
  - gumby 9y ago
    In a post-scarcity environment where robots do essentially all the work, thus the marginal cost of goods approaches 0, the point of money will be as a signalling mechanism (more iPhones and t-shorts, please; less Kale and paperclips, please) rather than as a reservoir of wealth. It's not at all clear to me what some weenies will try to use to signify wealth and status, but it need not be money.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  There is a difference between the world that has no jobs for people not in a handful of professions because they have each been replaced by different, specialized AI/machinery and not yet human level general AI. The not yet human level general AI will become human and then post human level very, very quickly and, so long as it is friendly, humanity wins all the things. The danger will be in the journey from the state you describe to the end goal - once we are there feeding people will be no issue and everyone will be obsolete anyway.
pixelbill 9y ago
We are reaching a tipping point in society. The issue of the "unemployable" class is becoming an issue now. What do we do when someone is not skilled enough to do complex jobs but no one will pay them (when much cheaper machine options are available) to do the simple jobs? We have two options as I see it: 1) Provide a government safety net for those who can not find employment. or 2) Forget about them, dissolve safety nets and enrich only the upper echelon of society. We're currently on the fast track to #2..
slowmovintarget 9y ago
How about schools not try to prepare compliant workers and instead try to teach children how to learn and think? History, art, music, mathematics, science, literature... you know, an education, not training.
- itronitron 9y ago
  I went to such a school. Organizations really should focus on hiring non-compliant workers (or at least not filtering them out) as they will drive the organization forward.
- junkscience2017 9y ago
  This is a popular response whenever the topic of education is brought up...I hate to trot out the now-hackneyed term "privilege"....but really. Very few people in society have the privilege of treating education as a route to becoming cultured. The storied universities you cherish were built by the rich for the rich, it is only recently that we have determined that the masses desperately need a grounding in romantic literature. Is it important to you that your accountant know Chaucer? Does your favorite artist really need to know chemistry? In the end you have to feed yourself. I don't want to be responsible for feeding you and you don't want to be responsible for feeding me. If that means you learn something applied that is only useful for ten years and requires you to learn something else useful in the next ten years, so be it. As it stands, why do people put such an emphasis on what someone studies as an undergraduate? Personally, I love reading history...read dozens of dense history books a year, and consider myself a decent self-taught historian. My degree is not in history. Why does it need to be?
  - epalmer 9y ago
    Note that I am a IS staff worker so my perspective is limited but I also have a recent grad from my school in my family with my oldest daughter. So some of what I speak of is personal and up close. I work at a liberal arts university and hear this from faculty: "We don't care about skills, we care about the ability to learn". The problem is that today's learners need to be super learners. They need the ability to do divergent thinking, then need to work collaboratively in teams. Working this way is a skill. They need to be able to solve a wide body of problems safely where failure does not impact grades. https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_pa... But they don't encourage this sort of learning. And don't even mention the "skill" word which is considered evil. I hear the 500 year old liberal arts model woks just fine. While our business school quietly is working on these skills and the students are finding great jobs and starting businesses successfully and more all while the liberal arts side is ignoring the future.
lucaspiller 9y ago
These type of articles always come with stark warnings that in the future many people won’t have jobs, however if you compare today’s technology versus the 60s and 70s, the data would tend to disagree. In the US the unemployment rate is now at it’s lowest point for 15 years, and if it continues to drop like this will be at the lowest for half a century. What’s going on here, is it just the criteria for unemployment has changed? https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
- fred_is_fred 9y ago
  Unemployment only measures people looking for work. So anyone who is retired (we have an aging population) or who has given up looking (for lack of skills, drug conviction, drug addiction, etc) also don't count. A more interesting graph is labor force participation.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    But when so much of the change in labor force participation rate is so easily tracked to aging, why would you make inferences about automation based on that?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
epalmer 9y ago
I wonder if the presence of automated everything, be it through software or AI or robots is going to be a long cycle self titrating process. If we automate too much, there will be less money in people's hands to buy goods and services and so less demand. The problem with this is that the lag time to seeing this effect is high. Then many people will be impacted.
- yeahsure 9y ago
  Just wanted to point out that people maybe will have less money, but the goods and services will also be a lot cheaper to produce.

Sure jobs are going to disappear, but with each new generation of technology new jobs are created. My job as a web developer didn't exist 30 years ago, and who knows, it might not exist any more 30 years from now. Labor markets evolve as technologies evolve, we just have to teach our children to be adaptable. As far as retail/service jobs go, I think enough people value human communication that we're not going to see a total robot takeover in these areas. People are going to want to go to 'premium' places that employ humans just like people are willing to pay extra for organic groceries.

senectus1 9y ago
Also I have to believe that there is a "robot critical mass" that will top out fairly quickly. Robots are expensive, to be able to afford them you need to have customers that can afford to buy them. They will only be able to afford them if they have enough work to earn the money to buy them.... I just dont forsee the "jobs apocalypse" that the dog whistlers seem to fear.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Robots have high capital costs, but are cheaper than workers in the US. A single robot is roughly equal to 3 workers since it can operate 24/7 and even if your humans only cost $5/hr, 3 humans would cost you $30k/yr before you even get to health insurance or payroll taxes. God forbid you have workers in Seattle, SF, NYC, etc where you would triple that number again.
  - itronitron 9y ago
    i wonder how much companies that own and use robots pay annually to insure them
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Also, some companies (Knightscope comes to mind) lease their robots at hourly rates, so the companies replacing workers don't even need to have the capital themselves.

justanotherjoe 9y ago

I see no data to support such a 'disruption'. On a related note why is everywhere i look it's people freaking out over AI. Even the title of the article is telling me to start worrying.

Zarath 9y ago

It seems to bizarre to me that of all the potential problems with AI, people seem to focus on employment. Like seriously, if we create AI good enough to displace a majority of humans from employment, I feel like we may have other things to worry about.

tluyben2 9y ago
You are probably talking about something else, but the worrying should be about wealth distribution after the robots (eventually) take over. No more 'normal' employment can and should be seen as a positive for humanity but not if the production is owned by a handful of people. To me that seems more dangerous than the chance of Terminators roaming the streets.
- gumby 9y ago
  In a post-scarcity environment where robots do essentially all the work, thus the marginal cost of goods approaches 0, the point of money will be as a signalling mechanism (more iPhones and t-shorts, please; less Kale and paperclips, please) rather than as a reservoir of wealth. It's not at all clear to me what some weenies will try to use to signify wealth and status, but it need not be money.
tomjen3 9y ago
There is a difference between the world that has no jobs for people not in a handful of professions because they have each been replaced by different, specialized AI/machinery and not yet human level general AI. The not yet human level general AI will become human and then post human level very, very quickly and, so long as it is friendly, humanity wins all the things. The danger will be in the journey from the state you describe to the end goal - once we are there feeding people will be no issue and everyone will be obsolete anyway.

pixelbill 9y ago

We are reaching a tipping point in society. The issue of the "unemployable" class is becoming an issue now. What do we do when someone is not skilled enough to do complex jobs but no one will pay them (when much cheaper machine options are available) to do the simple jobs? We have two options as I see it: 1) Provide a government safety net for those who can not find employment. or 2) Forget about them, dissolve safety nets and enrich only the upper echelon of society. We're currently on the fast track to #2..

slowmovintarget 9y ago

How about schools not try to prepare compliant workers and instead try to teach children how to learn and think? History, art, music, mathematics, science, literature... you know, an education, not training.

itronitron 9y ago
I went to such a school. Organizations really should focus on hiring non-compliant workers (or at least not filtering them out) as they will drive the organization forward.
junkscience2017 9y ago
This is a popular response whenever the topic of education is brought up...I hate to trot out the now-hackneyed term "privilege"....but really. Very few people in society have the privilege of treating education as a route to becoming cultured. The storied universities you cherish were built by the rich for the rich, it is only recently that we have determined that the masses desperately need a grounding in romantic literature. Is it important to you that your accountant know Chaucer? Does your favorite artist really need to know chemistry? In the end you have to feed yourself. I don't want to be responsible for feeding you and you don't want to be responsible for feeding me. If that means you learn something applied that is only useful for ten years and requires you to learn something else useful in the next ten years, so be it. As it stands, why do people put such an emphasis on what someone studies as an undergraduate? Personally, I love reading history...read dozens of dense history books a year, and consider myself a decent self-taught historian. My degree is not in history. Why does it need to be?
- epalmer 9y ago
  Note that I am a IS staff worker so my perspective is limited but I also have a recent grad from my school in my family with my oldest daughter. So some of what I speak of is personal and up close. I work at a liberal arts university and hear this from faculty: "We don't care about skills, we care about the ability to learn". The problem is that today's learners need to be super learners. They need the ability to do divergent thinking, then need to work collaboratively in teams. Working this way is a skill. They need to be able to solve a wide body of problems safely where failure does not impact grades. https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_pa... But they don't encourage this sort of learning. And don't even mention the "skill" word which is considered evil. I hear the 500 year old liberal arts model woks just fine. While our business school quietly is working on these skills and the students are finding great jobs and starting businesses successfully and more all while the liberal arts side is ignoring the future.

lucaspiller 9y ago

These type of articles always come with stark warnings that in the future many people won’t have jobs, however if you compare today’s technology versus the 60s and 70s, the data would tend to disagree. In the US the unemployment rate is now at it’s lowest point for 15 years, and if it continues to drop like this will be at the lowest for half a century. What’s going on here, is it just the criteria for unemployment has changed? https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

fred_is_fred 9y ago
Unemployment only measures people looking for work. So anyone who is retired (we have an aging population) or who has given up looking (for lack of skills, drug conviction, drug addiction, etc) also don't count. A more interesting graph is labor force participation.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  But when so much of the change in labor force participation rate is so easily tracked to aging, why would you make inferences about automation based on that?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

epalmer 9y ago

I wonder if the presence of automated everything, be it through software or AI or robots is going to be a long cycle self titrating process. If we automate too much, there will be less money in people's hands to buy goods and services and so less demand. The problem with this is that the lag time to seeing this effect is high. Then many people will be impacted.

yeahsure 9y ago
Just wanted to point out that people maybe will have less money, but the goods and services will also be a lot cheaper to produce.