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It's difficult to explain to people that manual labour is just going to go away, and educating the populace is the only way to be employable in the future. I a
by telesilla 8y ago
It's difficult to explain to people that manual labour is just going to go away, and educating the populace is the only way to be employable in the future.
I am curious what kind of society this will lead to - will it mean an increase in overall education or will it be a race to the bottom where only the most impractical work that robots can't do, is reserved for those who have no knowledge skills?
Though, my first job was in a kitchen while I was studying, as I didn't yet have the skills to get an knowledge job. I was lucky to have government support back then however, so while I was at the threshold of just paying rent/food and needed that job back then, it wouldn't have needed much more from the public coffers so I could have spent those manual-labour hours studying.
Edit: I forgot about the crossover of skilled labour: plumbers, electricians, some kinds of farm work, others I haven't considered. I guess I just see those are getting more and more specialised and need less labour rather than none.
- crdoconnor 8y agoIt's difficult to explain partly because over the last 10 years there has been more unskilled than skilled job growth which contradicts that narrative.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoI've heard that there is a huge need for machinists and that the pay is great, but all the newly graduated college kids want office jobs, so there aren't enough machinists to go around. Not sure if it is true, just heard the rumor, but would be interesting if it is...
- jes 8y agoA friend of mine works in the tool and die industry in the United States, as a machinist. He indicated that dies bought from China and elsewhere are often 1/3 to 1/4 the price of dies made in America. They don’t last as long and the tolerances are usually looser than American dies. They may contain flaws that require some rework before being put into service. Still, they are purchased in great volume, and he has trouble finding shops that can pay for someone with his expertise. He is overqualified relative to customer demand.
- RandomInteger4 8y agoIf he can't find work at the salary he's demanding then that means the market no longer supports said salary and he must adjust his expectations downward. We can't expect to have a monotonically increasing salary throughout our lives; see: 2008 Financial Crisis for instances of folks with masters degrees taking minimum wage service industry jobs.
- overthemoon 8y agoI'm skeptical. This narrative or others like it--x specialized labor pays well and needs tons of workers but this new soft generation thinks they're too good for it--has been bouncing around and I've personally never seen it corroborated with data.
- Bombthecat 8y agoWhat kind of society? I bet it will look like the movie elysium.
- SeanAppleby 8y agoI don't think medium-term future (like decades) job stability is clearly going to draw along lines of education. I think it would be far easier to automate certain kinds of labwork by doctors (particularly anything that looks at a series of images and matches them to a disorder), than to automate plumbing work. I think it will be easier to automate a lot of CPA's work (particularly anything like mapping data to where it fits into a structure of tax documents) than to automate running electrical lines in an existing house. The economics of a lot of currently high end knowledge work lends itself much more easily to automation than a lot of trades do, since they are addressable with a purely software solution in a relatively controlled problem space rather than through highly complex robotics in highly chaotic environments.