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'Reskilling Revolution Needed for the Millions of Jobs at Risk Due To Technological Disruption' (weforum.org)
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.
AI will also be coming for our jobs too. In fact, AI is already here and is eliminating entire categories of jobs.
Whatever.. a good buddy of mine got tired of being a ditch digger, and after two years of hard work and studying (starting with the lowly A+ and busting ass up the food chain) he's now a senior storage engineer for a top ten company in the Fortune 500 making over 150k a year in the midwestern US.
You need to understand that from a mental capacity and motivation standpoint, your buddy represents 1% of the toilet-cleaning/ditch-digging/truck-driving force out there.
We're only fucked if simpletons do not evolve to accept the fact that most traditional work will be obsolete, and the idea that you must toil to earn your keep.
Toil doing what? In case you didn't notice, the only simpletons on Star Trek were dressed in red, represented about 1% of the space fleet, and were predictably made obsolete within about 45 seconds of appearing on screen.
The key, of course, will be a certain amount of population control for future generations along with finding creative mental and physical outlets.
A major city suffers a blackout for more than 24 hours, and we find hospital delivery rooms overflowing 9 months later. Good luck implementing population control when the unemployable masses have little to do all day but eat, fuck, and sleep. That creative mental and physical outlet has already been proven. At least until the Fuckitron 3000 shows it can do that better than a human too.
While people (not just women, asshole) being able to stay home to spend more time with their kids would be a good outcome, there is of course zero "problem with youth" today.
People have been whining about "the problem with youth" at least since there have been written records, but it so happens that that's particularly stupid at the moment, assuming you live in any Western country.
"Youth" crime, like all crime, is down (multi decade trend that shows no sign of stopping). Teen pregnancy is down (ditto). Engagement in education is up. Fucking politeness is fashionable with young people. What the fuck do you want?
If there is any youth problem at all, it's a youth poverty problem, perhaps caused by concentration of wealth.
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.
To take a real world example, you may not be able to turn a coal miner into a robotics expert but you can re-train the coal miner to be a solar panel installer or wind turbine installer. The real urgency is to bring the coal miner's kids to a level of education that allows them to become robot repairmen. However, what the US is currently doing is promising the coal miners that the 19th century will come back, that the nation will go back to coal and oil, (cue flags, xenophobic rhetoric and patriotic music) which is stupid because wind and solar have been cheaper than coal for a while now and they are becoming cheaper than oil and gas which means solar and wind are in effect better choices for pure business reasons. Meanwhile Betsy DeVos is busy tearing the guts out of the public educations system in the name of libertarianism, objectivist philosophy and the private education industry so that public education can be replaced with a private system that leaves you with a worthless business degree, the mountain of debt you piled up to pay for it and fat bottom lines for the private education providers that sold it to you. The result will be generations of young people with huge student loan debts that can be milked for money by Wall Street, no markatable knowledge or skill and who would have been better off going to a community college and getting a degree in something useful (even if it isn't a spiffy business degree from some private college or big name Ivy League institution) and that's assuming there are any such community colleges left that haven't yet been eradicated by the likes of Betsy DeVos or some variation on Sam Brownback's 'Kansas Experiment'.
or at least it does to most people. It's certainly what I think of when I hear the phrase.
Also, what the devil are they going to retrain for? We're about to put every cashier and driver out of work. They're not all going to go off and be doctors, most folks just don't have the capacity. I guess we could think up new service jobs, but who's gonna pay them? It's not looking like folks are gonna have much money.
Also, you're assuming folks need to work or they become listless and frustrated and violent. I think that's only going to be a problem if they don't have enough money for food/shelter and (maybe, big maybe) a modicum of living (e.g. have a kid or two, go get drunk occasionally, that sort of thing).
All I see is more folks trying to put the onus on people to 're-skill' without talking about how they're gonna do that, if they even _can_ do that and where are the jobs going to come from. It sounds like blame shifting so we can all look the other way while 20% of the country's lives go to shit. That's certainly the vibe I got from Hillary Clinton.
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We are moving towards automation of our core requirements. Humanity requires three core categories of sustenance :
a) Food and water
b) Housing
c) Energy
If we leave out sex as a fourth requirement (though I'm hesitant to do so as I'm practically a dog at heart), we do not need anything more than what is listed above.
Food
We will eventually have 3d printers in our houses that are supplied by cartridges of core materials to produce meals of sustenance. They may or may not be yummy, but they will provide us with the nutrients we need to survive. The supply chain can eventually over time be automated as well. I've always dreamed of using underground tunnels with high pressure sodium lighting, air filtering, etc... to produce massive amounts of food of high quality rapidly. I have considered most of the details of automation, and I can't see why humans would have to be too involved with the process if the crops are managed and harvested using overhead robotic arms. It will have many bugs (technical and creepy crawly) at first, but over time, it could prove to be able to provide extremely high quality produce reliably and with minimal toxicity. With good generic alterations of the seeds, it should be possible to have almost perfect crops at almost all times. By improving the delivery chain through automation, a house could order what they need only when they need it and therefore greatly reduce waste.
An alternative approach to 3d printing is a meal on wheels kind of solution which would have centralized kitchens producing meals to order using machines and delivering them via drones. This could be more practical.
Real meat will become a luxury and we'll either switch to eating bug meat or we'll switch to eating meat grown from stem cells. I believe stem cells makes more sense. But we'll do away with animal farms in the future as they're terrible for the planet, generally inhumane and they require far too much work for something we can do far better with stem cells. Also consider that we waste more than 30% of the meat we produce currently. Milk is actually not a requirement of life, but if we decide to keep it around, I have no answer to how to do that.
Water
Most of humanities problems with water can be resolved with better logistics. There are places on earth which are perfect for managing water and there are places which are not. For example, California is not a good place for water. If we force people to abandon California for more suitable places like Colorado or even Alaska and Canada for example, we can solve many of our water supply problems. In addition, thanks to problems in places like South Africa today, we will put a great deal more effort into solving water supply chain problems. This can be done through reclamation, filtration, etc... we will get better with water by necessity sooner than later and these systems will be highly automated over time.
Housing
As we automate waste removal which already has seen massive improvements through trucks that can lift trash cans from the side of the road using arms... we will see further automation of gathering of raw materials. The raw materials will be collected and shipped to recycling plants which automatically sort trash (see waste management in places like Sandefjord Norway) and once the materials are properly sorted, much material can be automatically reprocessed into raw materials for new construction.
China has made massive progress in flatpack housing, highrises, even almost complete cities. Trucks are loaded with click together housing components in the opposite order they should be removed from the trucks. Cranes are then operated to remove item by item to click into place and with little additional work, a house could be built in a an hour or two using nothing but self driving and self operating robots. The factories will eventually be automated to produce the components using automated systems. With a little more work, the materials delivered from trash recycling (parti