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'Reskilling Revolution Needed for the Millions of Jobs at Risk Due To Technological Disruption' (weforum.org)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

A new report, published by The World Economic Forum on Monday estimates that 1.4 million U.S. jobs will be hit by automation between now and 2026. Of those, 57 percent belong to women. Without re-education, 16 percent of affected workers will have no job prospects, the study finds. A further 25 percent would have one to three job options. The report adds The positive finding from the report is that with adequate reskilling, 95% of the most immediately at-risk workers would find good-quality, higher-wage work in growing job families. Report highlights the urgent need for a massive reskilling programme, safety nets to support workers while they reskill, and support with job-matching.

4 of 427 comments (clear)

  1. Reskilling is a horrible word by Billy+the+Mountain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I liked retraining better.

    --
    That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
  2. They still don't fucking get it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You cannot retrain a toilet cleaner to be a robot repairman.

    After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.

    A wave or two after that, there will be no humans who can do anything a machine can't do better and cheaper. Not engineers. Not artists. Not politicians. Not CEOs. Not you, either.

    Nobody. Period.

    "Jobs" are going to be OVER soon. Concentrating on putting people in different jobs ignores the main problem.

    We better fucking come up with a better way to run things and a way to make the transition, or we're fucked.

    1. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by Hizonner · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think this is true.

      Even today, nobody seems to be willing to face up to the idea that not everybody can be high-skilled, and the economy can't necessarily absorb that much high-skilled labor even if they could.

      When machines are higher-than-high-skilled, human labor becomes more and more economically irrelevant.

    2. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by bettodavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ironically cleaning toilets, moping floors, de-dusting offices and a lot of menial tasks are very hard to fully or cheaply automate.

      And please, don't get all "Roomba!" on me, because what a Roomba can do is but a small fraction of what a passably good cleaning person can do.
      Many manual yet specialized blue collar jobs are equally difficult to fully automate. That's why self driving trucks are seen as such a big deal, given the mass of people potentially impacted and because such occurrences are not that common.

      Paper pushers on the other hand, are in quite more risk of being replaced by a slightly better document processor/generator.