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Another topic Yang brings up frequently besides the Freedom dividend is retraining. Automation in retail, driving, etc. has the potential to make jobs obsolete

Another topic Yang brings up frequently besides the Freedom dividend is retraining. Automation in retail, driving, etc. has the potential to make jobs obsolete at a rapid pace. Rather than trying to fight to save jobs that can be done by machines the idea is to retrain people in these industries to do things machines aren't good at. The idea is to not slow down progress but also not abandon people who happen to have built a life in a dying field.

ousta 8y ago
that is in every program since dawn of 20th century: Here is https://www.axios.com/trump-workers-program-ivanka-automation-high-tech-retraining-9a3e5b9f-df2e-4312-8d95-c4d4e4d6c4ac.html https://www.axios.com/trump-workers-program-ivanka-automatio...
Alex3917 8y ago
He does frequently bring up retraining, but in the context that government-sponsored retraining programs have between a 0% and a 15% success rate. E.g. the graduation rate for former military employees who then go to college is 0%. So retraining isn't a solution to jobs being lost by automation and even if we get significantly better at retraining it's still probably not a solution.
- bazooka_penguin 8y ago
  Are there any retraining programs that have more than a 50% success rate? Has retraining ever been a realistic option for job loss? Seems more likely the next generation would make up for the lost jobs on paper
  - beat 8y ago
    Nope. Retraining has never worked. Yang is quite explicit about that.
    - eghad 8y ago
      And he's wrong. Retraining has been effective in several European nations like Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, especially for older adults (there's a reason even DeVos and Trump name drop them). The fundamental difference (from the US programs attempted in the past) primarily lies in the amount of money per worker spent and the level of state control/centralization. Furthermore, companies there seem actively enthusiastic about ensuring they have a skilled population pool in the future regardless of the short term ROI. Personally I think the 2017 tax cuts should be rolled back for a lot of industries and used as an incentive for companies to develop proper apprenticeship programs and collaborate with universities/community colleges/trade schools to teach the exact skills they're looking for.
  - notfromhere 8y ago
    People don't have that kind of elasticity on skills, the ability to retrain a 20 year old and 50 year old are very different
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    I always hear about these “retraining programs” but I’ve never met anyone who has done one. Where do these programs even happen? What are they training people to do? Is it offered to people who file for unemployment or meant to be more proactive?
    - abecode 8y ago
      I teach data science at a masters programs (University of St Thomas graduate programs in software in the twin cities) and we have some students who are part of retraining programs. Apparently if a big company lays off a significant chunk of workforce and off-shores it, there are programs funded through corporate taxes that the laid off workers can use to go to school. The students in my anecdotal experience (2 semesters so far) are pretty good. I think there must be more than one such program because some students required a sign off from me but others didn't. It's just a few students that I know of so it's not a super large scale but it's nice to know that such programs exist at least.
      - elliekelly 8y ago
        Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm pleasantly surprised to hear the programs include such high-level courses.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  Can you back that zero percent number up with any sort of data? This article https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is-the-student-veteran-graduation-rate-so-low/523779/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is... says that the number isn’t even officially tracked, though it’s probably low. However, it also points out some places do manage to graduate a decent proportion of veterans, so it might be a matter of finding the right approach rather than an impossibility.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    I'd be interested to know how many of those vets end up getting a job after they graduate though, other retraining programs measure job retention as opposed to program completion.
- drharby 8y ago
  I fear your military stat is inaccurate and taken out of context, making it meaningless for any inference on this matter. Military population jas a selection bias for people with high thresholds of tolerance for difficult tasks amd by end of training usually have otjer confounding factors affecting their graduation, ie. Ptsd, lack of purpose, loss of fraternity, etc.
- eghad 8y ago
  You're going to need to provide a source for your claims that 0% graduate. A handful of my classmates from Carnegie Mellon were veterans (some with trauma) and all graduated within the typical timeline. The NVEST report from 2017 on student veterans [0][1] show an approximate 54% graduation rate within 6 years (18% were still enrolled, 28% dropped out) greater than the general averages. While the washout rate for 2 year programs is particularly high, your idea that retraining isn't achievable is flawed. [0]https://nvest.studentveterans.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/NVEST-Report_FINAL.pdf https://nvest.studentveterans.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03... [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is-the-student-veteran-graduation-rate-so-low/523779/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is...
  - chillacy 8y ago
    If they got into CMU they're already the cream of the crop. The low rate covers all the other people who never made it to CMU, dropped out of the labor force and got onto disability.
    - DuskStar 8y ago
      The NVEST numbers (54%) include everyone though.
      - chillacy 8y ago
        I see, I missed the part where it was veterans. I'm not informed enough to know why that program's success is so much higher than the ~37% success for manufacturing workers or Michigan's No Worker Left Behind (30% unemployment vs 40% for those not retrained). If I had to guess, it could be because vets are younger and more able to learn new things, or it could also be that measuring graduation rates is different than measuring employment (plenty of college grads don't find employment in their field of study).
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    Hmm apparently I'm just wrong. I could have sworn there was a Wired article about this from a few years ago, but I can't find any evidence of it online or in my notes or in my previous HN comments.
- esahione 8y ago
  Lol @ software engineers complaining about ageism and at the same time thinking retraining a 50yo truck driver is a reasonable solution
  - haukilup 8y ago
    > Lol @ software engineers complaining about ageism and at the same time thinking retraining a 50yo truck driver is a reasonable solution I'm not sure who these software engineers are. Anonymous online comments are unlikely to be a good source of determining how many people truly believe what you seem to think some of them believe. Is retraining a 50yo truck unreasonable? Retraining them to become a software developer is probably unreasonable for most. But what about other jobs and types of labor? What about training them in more general skills that are valued in today's workplace and economy, as a part of a broader approach to tackling the issues facing the job market and economy?
el_cujo 8y ago
I listened to him talk a little bit on Joe Rogan's podcast, and it seemed to him that the UBI/Freedom Dividend is his plan explicitly because stuff like retraining these fifty year old guys who have been truck drivers or coal miners their entire lives to become computer programmers or something is really unrealistic. I guess it would be more possible to retrain the younger people that populate retail, but really I think retail is viewed as just something people do to put themselves through college or during highschool rather than a life-long career like truck driving. That's not to say there aren't people in retail who aren't going to get screwed by automation, but that's sort of the appeal of UBI, it's something that applies to everyone versus having to try and justify to someone that you deserve help for your specific circumstances.
- _red 8y ago
  >retraining these fifty year old guys who have been truck drivers or coal miners While thats true, I think the premise is wrong. Techno-types love to imagine that automation is just going to sweep through these industries. The devil of these things is in the details. Yes, perhaps the tech can get to approximate 90% of what a human can do. However, the real problem are outside of tech. Like liability insurance. Who gets sued when one of Elon's driverless trucks plows into a school bus? Surely not the "trucking company"? So the software company will have to assume that...Now, imagine there are 50M driverless vehicles on the roads, what does that monthly policy look like? What insurance company will underwrite that? What happens if a zero-day is found? etc. etc.
  - beat 8y ago
    It's not just trucks, though. He gives a lot of examples, some of which are observable today. Like a lot of work done by paralegals and junior lawyers is just research - plowing through books and writing summaries and references. It's slow, tedious, and error-prone. A computer can do it much faster and better. How about reading x-rays? Train an AI by having it review the results from millions of other x-rays. That's a lot of radiologists whose work is replaceable. And that's really Yang's point. It's not just truck drivers. Any job that is basically rote work - even jobs requiring a high level of education and professional certification - is vulnerable to advances in AI and robotics. If your work isn't essentially creative, there's a good chance that it could be done cheaper, faster, and better by a robot at some point in the not-too-distant future.
beat 8y ago
I don't read him as big on "retraining" at all. He's certainly critical of how it's usually expressed politically - "We'll just turn those 50 year old truck drivers into computer programmers!" It just doesn't work that way.
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
Retraining is a ridiculous proposition to address this issue, which is what he says about the topic as well.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  Just train all of the cashiers and truck drivers to become mechanical engineers. It's simple! /s
  - everdev 8y ago
    Why do you jump from blue collar to high tech in the retraining conversation? Sounds like an extreme that people aren't arguing for. I think retraining a cole miner to use similar tools or equipment (like in a quarry) would be what most people are talking about. Or retraining retail to be in customer service.
    - rubinelli 8y ago
      The Green New Deal would create tens of thousands of blue collar jobs. Can a coal miner be retrained to install and maintain solar panels? I bet they can.
      - beat 8y ago
        So what if they can be trained to install solar panels? Are there going to be gobs of new solar panel installation jobs in their hometowns where the coal mine closed? This is a huge part of the problem. The brightest and most ambitious get out of dying communities and go elsewhere (heck, America is made largely of the descendants of people who did exactly that). But not everyone wants to move away from their hometown. Not everyone has the resources to start over somewhere else, even if they wanted to do so.
        dllthomas 8y ago
        > Are there going to be gobs of new solar panel installation jobs in their hometowns where the coal mine closed? Maybe if everyone's, say, getting a $1000/mo UBI...
9999px 8y ago
I think "progress" is a culturally and personally subjective concept. To me, a lot of the progress we're making is efficiency only for the sake of profit. We should be answering the deeper question of "what's the point of work?" Do businesses exist to make profit for a small group of people or do they exist as privately-owned community pillars providing services and wages to citizens? Personally, I lean towards the latter. And that's as a business owner twice-over. We should also be asking ourselves "why do we make the products we make?" Are we building and consuming to fulfill an urge created by advertising? If so, can we scale back advertising and thus consumption and thus waste? Unionization and employee-ownership are other options for fairly distributing wealth based on effort. A shop that unionizes can vote to automate – or not – and thus control their own destiny. Granted we're not there yet legally; our laws skew heavily in the favor of business owners. So were a union shop to vote to _not_ automate, a shop that fired all of its employees and automated would more than likely succeed in the market. And that brings me full-circle – is succeeding in the market and being profitable more important than keeping people employed in a democratically-controlled workplace?
- pxue 8y ago
  Here's my question about unions and worker controlled workplaces.. What happens when the entire shop becomes uncompetitive? It's the same as when a country is happily going about their day and suddenly tanks show up at your door because someone else wants what you have. that's just human nature, I don't see a way around it.
  - 9999px 8y ago
    I don't believe it's human nature. I believe it's decades of prioritizing profits over civic results – we've warped our culture to the point of valuing monetary progress/success over humanity itself. I'm sure this sounds very bleeding heart, but as a business owner, I'd rather give up stake in my own business to keep my employees and their families fed rather than opt for automation, firing my employees, and sitting in an empty office with piles of cash. Business owners and shareholders need to learn empathy and start valuing the community at large over their own narrow interests. To answer your question, though: I don't know. The U.S. is an owner/exec-first economy, with labor holding very little political power. "At will" employment and "Right to Work" are inherently anti-union policies and although some states have successfully beat them back (Missouri for example), a majority of the country's labor is still without ways to organize. It's a chicken and egg problem. A unionized shop probably couldn't compete against a full automated shop (depending on the industry). So until _most_ shops are unionized – which won't happen with rulings like Janus – it's almost an impossible task to organize the working class. More reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/08/missouri-voters-defeat-gop-backed-right-work-law-victory-unions-associated-press-projects/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/08/missouri-... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/janus-afscme-public-sector-unions/563879/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/janus-a...

ousta 8y ago

that is in every program since dawn of 20th century: Here is https://www.axios.com/trump-workers-program-ivanka-automation-high-tech-retraining-9a3e5b9f-df2e-4312-8d95-c4d4e4d6c4ac.html https://www.axios.com/trump-workers-program-ivanka-automatio...

Alex3917 8y ago

He does frequently bring up retraining, but in the context that government-sponsored retraining programs have between a 0% and a 15% success rate. E.g. the graduation rate for former military employees who then go to college is 0%. So retraining isn't a solution to jobs being lost by automation and even if we get significantly better at retraining it's still probably not a solution.

bazooka_penguin 8y ago
Are there any retraining programs that have more than a 50% success rate? Has retraining ever been a realistic option for job loss? Seems more likely the next generation would make up for the lost jobs on paper
- beat 8y ago
  Nope. Retraining has never worked. Yang is quite explicit about that.
  - eghad 8y ago
    And he's wrong. Retraining has been effective in several European nations like Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, especially for older adults (there's a reason even DeVos and Trump name drop them). The fundamental difference (from the US programs attempted in the past) primarily lies in the amount of money per worker spent and the level of state control/centralization. Furthermore, companies there seem actively enthusiastic about ensuring they have a skilled population pool in the future regardless of the short term ROI. Personally I think the 2017 tax cuts should be rolled back for a lot of industries and used as an incentive for companies to develop proper apprenticeship programs and collaborate with universities/community colleges/trade schools to teach the exact skills they're looking for.
- notfromhere 8y ago
  People don't have that kind of elasticity on skills, the ability to retrain a 20 year old and 50 year old are very different
- elliekelly 8y ago
  I always hear about these “retraining programs” but I’ve never met anyone who has done one. Where do these programs even happen? What are they training people to do? Is it offered to people who file for unemployment or meant to be more proactive?
  - abecode 8y ago
    I teach data science at a masters programs (University of St Thomas graduate programs in software in the twin cities) and we have some students who are part of retraining programs. Apparently if a big company lays off a significant chunk of workforce and off-shores it, there are programs funded through corporate taxes that the laid off workers can use to go to school. The students in my anecdotal experience (2 semesters so far) are pretty good. I think there must be more than one such program because some students required a sign off from me but others didn't. It's just a few students that I know of so it's not a super large scale but it's nice to know that such programs exist at least.
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm pleasantly surprised to hear the programs include such high-level courses.
mattkrause 8y ago
Can you back that zero percent number up with any sort of data? This article https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is-the-student-veteran-graduation-rate-so-low/523779/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is... says that the number isn’t even officially tracked, though it’s probably low. However, it also points out some places do manage to graduate a decent proportion of veterans, so it might be a matter of finding the right approach rather than an impossibility.
- chillacy 8y ago
  I'd be interested to know how many of those vets end up getting a job after they graduate though, other retraining programs measure job retention as opposed to program completion.
drharby 8y ago
I fear your military stat is inaccurate and taken out of context, making it meaningless for any inference on this matter. Military population jas a selection bias for people with high thresholds of tolerance for difficult tasks amd by end of training usually have otjer confounding factors affecting their graduation, ie. Ptsd, lack of purpose, loss of fraternity, etc.
eghad 8y ago
You're going to need to provide a source for your claims that 0% graduate. A handful of my classmates from Carnegie Mellon were veterans (some with trauma) and all graduated within the typical timeline. The NVEST report from 2017 on student veterans [0][1] show an approximate 54% graduation rate within 6 years (18% were still enrolled, 28% dropped out) greater than the general averages. While the washout rate for 2 year programs is particularly high, your idea that retraining isn't achievable is flawed. [0]https://nvest.studentveterans.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/NVEST-Report_FINAL.pdf https://nvest.studentveterans.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03... [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is-the-student-veteran-graduation-rate-so-low/523779/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/why-is...
- chillacy 8y ago
  If they got into CMU they're already the cream of the crop. The low rate covers all the other people who never made it to CMU, dropped out of the labor force and got onto disability.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    The NVEST numbers (54%) include everyone though.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      I see, I missed the part where it was veterans. I'm not informed enough to know why that program's success is so much higher than the ~37% success for manufacturing workers or Michigan's No Worker Left Behind (30% unemployment vs 40% for those not retrained). If I had to guess, it could be because vets are younger and more able to learn new things, or it could also be that measuring graduation rates is different than measuring employment (plenty of college grads don't find employment in their field of study).
- Alex3917 8y ago
  Hmm apparently I'm just wrong. I could have sworn there was a Wired article about this from a few years ago, but I can't find any evidence of it online or in my notes or in my previous HN comments.
esahione 8y ago
Lol @ software engineers complaining about ageism and at the same time thinking retraining a 50yo truck driver is a reasonable solution
- haukilup 8y ago
  > Lol @ software engineers complaining about ageism and at the same time thinking retraining a 50yo truck driver is a reasonable solution I'm not sure who these software engineers are. Anonymous online comments are unlikely to be a good source of determining how many people truly believe what you seem to think some of them believe. Is retraining a 50yo truck unreasonable? Retraining them to become a software developer is probably unreasonable for most. But what about other jobs and types of labor? What about training them in more general skills that are valued in today's workplace and economy, as a part of a broader approach to tackling the issues facing the job market and economy?

el_cujo 8y ago

I listened to him talk a little bit on Joe Rogan's podcast, and it seemed to him that the UBI/Freedom Dividend is his plan explicitly because stuff like retraining these fifty year old guys who have been truck drivers or coal miners their entire lives to become computer programmers or something is really unrealistic. I guess it would be more possible to retrain the younger people that populate retail, but really I think retail is viewed as just something people do to put themselves through college or during highschool rather than a life-long career like truck driving. That's not to say there aren't people in retail who aren't going to get screwed by automation, but that's sort of the appeal of UBI, it's something that applies to everyone versus having to try and justify to someone that you deserve help for your specific circumstances.

_red 8y ago
>retraining these fifty year old guys who have been truck drivers or coal miners While thats true, I think the premise is wrong. Techno-types love to imagine that automation is just going to sweep through these industries. The devil of these things is in the details. Yes, perhaps the tech can get to approximate 90% of what a human can do. However, the real problem are outside of tech. Like liability insurance. Who gets sued when one of Elon's driverless trucks plows into a school bus? Surely not the "trucking company"? So the software company will have to assume that...Now, imagine there are 50M driverless vehicles on the roads, what does that monthly policy look like? What insurance company will underwrite that? What happens if a zero-day is found? etc. etc.
- beat 8y ago
  It's not just trucks, though. He gives a lot of examples, some of which are observable today. Like a lot of work done by paralegals and junior lawyers is just research - plowing through books and writing summaries and references. It's slow, tedious, and error-prone. A computer can do it much faster and better. How about reading x-rays? Train an AI by having it review the results from millions of other x-rays. That's a lot of radiologists whose work is replaceable. And that's really Yang's point. It's not just truck drivers. Any job that is basically rote work - even jobs requiring a high level of education and professional certification - is vulnerable to advances in AI and robotics. If your work isn't essentially creative, there's a good chance that it could be done cheaper, faster, and better by a robot at some point in the not-too-distant future.

beat 8y ago

I don't read him as big on "retraining" at all. He's certainly critical of how it's usually expressed politically - "We'll just turn those 50 year old truck drivers into computer programmers!" It just doesn't work that way.

lawnchair_larry 8y ago

Retraining is a ridiculous proposition to address this issue, which is what he says about the topic as well.

jniedrauer 8y ago
Just train all of the cashiers and truck drivers to become mechanical engineers. It's simple! /s
- everdev 8y ago
  Why do you jump from blue collar to high tech in the retraining conversation? Sounds like an extreme that people aren't arguing for. I think retraining a cole miner to use similar tools or equipment (like in a quarry) would be what most people are talking about. Or retraining retail to be in customer service.
  - rubinelli 8y ago
    The Green New Deal would create tens of thousands of blue collar jobs. Can a coal miner be retrained to install and maintain solar panels? I bet they can.
    - beat 8y ago
      So what if they can be trained to install solar panels? Are there going to be gobs of new solar panel installation jobs in their hometowns where the coal mine closed? This is a huge part of the problem. The brightest and most ambitious get out of dying communities and go elsewhere (heck, America is made largely of the descendants of people who did exactly that). But not everyone wants to move away from their hometown. Not everyone has the resources to start over somewhere else, even if they wanted to do so.
      - dllthomas 8y ago
        > Are there going to be gobs of new solar panel installation jobs in their hometowns where the coal mine closed? Maybe if everyone's, say, getting a $1000/mo UBI...

9999px 8y ago

I think "progress" is a culturally and personally subjective concept. To me, a lot of the progress we're making is efficiency only for the sake of profit. We should be answering the deeper question of "what's the point of work?" Do businesses exist to make profit for a small group of people or do they exist as privately-owned community pillars providing services and wages to citizens? Personally, I lean towards the latter. And that's as a business owner twice-over. We should also be asking ourselves "why do we make the products we make?" Are we building and consuming to fulfill an urge created by advertising? If so, can we scale back advertising and thus consumption and thus waste? Unionization and employee-ownership are other options for fairly distributing wealth based on effort. A shop that unionizes can vote to automate – or not – and thus control their own destiny. Granted we're not there yet legally; our laws skew heavily in the favor of business owners. So were a union shop to vote to _not_ automate, a shop that fired all of its employees and automated would more than likely succeed in the market. And that brings me full-circle – is succeeding in the market and being profitable more important than keeping people employed in a democratically-controlled workplace?

pxue 8y ago
Here's my question about unions and worker controlled workplaces.. What happens when the entire shop becomes uncompetitive? It's the same as when a country is happily going about their day and suddenly tanks show up at your door because someone else wants what you have. that's just human nature, I don't see a way around it.
- 9999px 8y ago
  I don't believe it's human nature. I believe it's decades of prioritizing profits over civic results – we've warped our culture to the point of valuing monetary progress/success over humanity itself. I'm sure this sounds very bleeding heart, but as a business owner, I'd rather give up stake in my own business to keep my employees and their families fed rather than opt for automation, firing my employees, and sitting in an empty office with piles of cash. Business owners and shareholders need to learn empathy and start valuing the community at large over their own narrow interests. To answer your question, though: I don't know. The U.S. is an owner/exec-first economy, with labor holding very little political power. "At will" employment and "Right to Work" are inherently anti-union policies and although some states have successfully beat them back (Missouri for example), a majority of the country's labor is still without ways to organize. It's a chicken and egg problem. A unionized shop probably couldn't compete against a full automated shop (depending on the industry). So until _most_ shops are unionized – which won't happen with rulings like Janus – it's almost an impossible task to organize the working class. More reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/08/missouri-voters-defeat-gop-backed-right-work-law-victory-unions-associated-press-projects/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/08/missouri-... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/janus-afscme-public-sector-unions/563879/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/janus-a...