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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.

33 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.
    1. Re:Reskilling is a horrible word by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 2

      I read this as res-killing, i.e. killing a player in a multiplayer game right after they resurrect following a previous death. So yeah, not a useful alternative for retraining.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:Reskilling is a horrible word by SirGarlon · · Score: 2

      That's a pretty accurate description of what the labor market is doing to some people. A filing clerk gets displaced by automation and retrains to a higher-skilled service job, like ... librarian. Then reasonable Web searches come along, and the demand for reference assistance dries up overnight. Just one example of a career res-kill.

      --
      [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
    3. Re:Reskilling is a horrible word by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

      Yes... I suspect the "reskilling" revolution will be actually looking ahead. There's no point in retraining people to do work that is just going to be in the next wave (or the one after that) of jobs that are automated.

      The revolution will be telling people to go do something they like doing and not worry about whether some corp will pay you to sit in an office for eight to ten hours a day.

    4. Re:Reskilling is a horrible word by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Someone I know posted a diagram of the feudal system on Facebook today. It shows food flowing down to the peasants from the aristocracy. That's exactly what the aristocracy likes the peasants to think... never mind that the only source of food is the farms that the peasants work.

      I have another friend who's a lawyer. She was complaining about working long hours. I asked if her firm was in trouble and couldn't afford to hire more lawyers. Nah, we're swimming in money. Shortage of lawyers? Nah, lots of good unemployed ones. So why? The culture says that if you don't work ridiculous hours you're not a good lawyer, so everyone does it.

      You're right, some people need to work so people can eat, have shelter, etc. At one time, when humanity existed on the edge, that number was equal to (sometimes exceeded) the population. It has been decreasing for a long time, and is currently surprisingly small. It looks to decrease dramatically in the future, as more automation takes over many of the few remaining critical jobs.

      The vast majority of us in western nations do not work so we (or anybody else) can eat or have shelter. We work doing various things, a surprising number of which are completely unnecessary, in order to convince our lords to give us food and money.

  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.

    3. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by apoc.famine · · Score: 2

      They're not suggesting to retrain toilet cleaners into robot repairmen. What they're suggesting is even dumber, because the jobs they want people to train for are also going away.

      They're picking families of jobs, predicting the ebb and flow of jobs within that family, magically finding that they come out even, and saying thus reskilling is what we need.

      As I noted below, they think that we're going to need less data entry people and more receptionists. Since they're both in the Office and Administrative family, we'll just reskill the data entry people into receptionists, thus solving the problem once and for all.

      ONCE AND FOR ALL!

      --
      Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
    4. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

      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.

    5. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by Freischutz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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'.

    6. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      It's not clear to me this is true. Sure, there may be some janitors who literally cannot be trained for better jobs, but of the millions of people doing those kinds of jobs there's bound to be many who could be trained for something more challenging.

      I don't think, however, retraining toilet cleaners is in the cards, for two reasons. First, there isn't a job "toilet cleaner"; it's a task glommed onto various low status jobs. It's unlikely we'll see that task automated because it's not a big, immediate head count win. Secondly, and more importantly, I don't think politicians care about people doing low status jobs to do anything for them if they lose their jobs.

      Look at rural and small town census tracts after the Great Recession -- there was no "after the recession" for them, it's still on. Sure they get lip service, but if you think anyone is going to prioritize the interests of an out-of-work coal miner over a fracking billionaire, consider that these are also the places which are ravaged by the opioid crisis. There's lots of posturing on that issue too, but no action. Drug wholesalers, over the course of two years, shipped nine million pills to a single pharmacy in West Virginia serving a community of less than four hundred people, and no politicians have proposed anything to prevent things like that happening again.

      59,000 people are killed in the US by the opioid crisis annually, the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every two weeks, but we must tread carefully lest we harm drug company profits. I submit to you that demonstrates the lower value we put on the lives of those people relative to the lives of bankers.

      If we can't be bothered lift a finger to save their lives, why would we save their jobs?

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    7. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 2

      You might want to look at history. Almost all of the jobs that were performed 500 years ago have been automated.

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    8. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by gweihir · · Score: 2

      Actually, everybody is at risk. I agree that the "paper pushers" will suffer horribly and that is the first time this happens. Many jobs in the "paper pusher" class can already be automatized to a large degree and it keeps getting cheaper to do so. But keep in mind that an empty (or not built in the first place) office building does not need cleaners either.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    9. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 2

      This is not true. There is no way that this statement can be true while there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US. There are even fewer ways it can be true when low-skill assembly work in China is all done by tens of millions of human beings. Those facts on the ground and the idea that human work is on its way out are mutually exclusive. The latter idea is not grounded in reality. It presupposes science-fiction levels of machine capability that just don't exist in real life. Not only do those machines not exist, they aren't even close to existing. Stop believing the hype and start understanding reality.

    10. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by HiThere · · Score: 2

      Well, you lived up to your handle.

      OTOH, it does appear to be true that unemployment is actually decreasing at the moment. I haven't yet seen an analysis of *which* jobs are increasing, and what percentage of the population is counted as "not part of the workforce because discouraged", so I don't know what that means.

      OTOH, factories in China are being automated because it's cheaper than hiring workers. So far the Chinese government seems to be handling it, but there have been lots of predictions that their approaches will not continue to work.

      So I would like to hear your justification as to why "This cannot be true", as a simple assertion doesn't seem very convincing. Complex situations are subject to rapid changes of state. E.g. one accident can jam an entire freeway. If, as predicted, self driving vehicles become a "real thing" in the next few years, that will put a very large number of people out of work, eventually all commercial drivers. And if the cost savings are as predicted, then eventually will probably be on the order of 10 years, in a distribution with a fast rise and a long tail. This will throw about 1/5 of the current work force out of work or at least needing drastic reskilling. Not just the drivers, but the cafe workers, etc. and the mechanics will need LOTS of retraining that will not be cheap...so most of them won't be able to afford it unless subsidized. And note that it wouldn't be cheaper to use automated vehicles if they needed much skilled maintenance. So that will only absorb a very small fraction.

      And the above projection doesn't even consider the effects of more and more companies switching to short term contractors (hourly contractors?) to do the work. I was quite shocked to see that this included things like firms of lawyers, but apparently it does. Perhaps for some lawyers this is an advantage, but it strikes me as a "Star system" where some people will be rewarded excessively, and most will loose out totally, with a few in the middle. In this kind of a system the mode is abject failure, and the median is bare survival. It's one thing if the entertainment industry runs that way, but when most industries are run in that pattern, the mode is going to be "out of work".

      So to me the estimate seems not only possible, but somewhere between plausible and probable. There are clearly ways around it, but the one's I'm aware of all would require an extensive restructuring of the economic system, and even then they would need lots of debugging.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    11. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by jeff4747 · · Score: 2

      There is no reason to make any projections for the future that are predicated on a technology that does not exist

      There is if you want to avoid suffering and bloodshed that will be involved if you don't.

      Since humans evolved, work has equated survival. From hunting and gathering to today's paychecks, you survive because you work. When work disappears, we will break that construct. Redesigning our societies around a change that large is not a small undertaking. And if we don't start laying the groundwork before there are billions of starving people, there will be massive violence.

      For example, Syria is in civil war because of famine. Desperate, hungry people turned to various radicals because they had money and thus food. Repeating that on a global scale would be a very bad thing.

      Long-haul hub-to-hub trucking might be more automated, but urban delivery requires human intervention as much as it requires driving. In fact, there might be more delivery jobs if the truck drives itself and several delivery guys sit in the back and do their thing when the truck stops

      At one point in time, people believed that automatic dishwashers would be a robot with arms mounted over your sink. The robot would pick up a plate, wash it in the sink, rinse it off, and dry it with a towel. Because that's how humans did dishes and any automation would do what the humans do, right?

      Instead, we have boxes under our counters. And we completely changed how we make plates, cutlery and cookware to make those compatible with the box under the counter.

      We will happily convert our way of doing things to fit automation instead of always requiring automation to fit the way we do things. Which means we would likely accept some sort of standardized delivery system that fits nicely with automation.

      Factory assembly work: machines need to be reprogrammed to do different tasks. Assembly machines don't just need to be reprogrammed, they need to be redesigned and rebuilt to do different tasks. Humans don't. Humans win

      Yep! That's why there are no robots in factories today......oh wait...

      It turns out a machine that can do the job 24/7/365 and not have a pesky need for food and sleep wins over humans that do.

      Also, we're postulating an environment where robots can build robots. So there's no need for humans to be involved in that redesign/rebuild.

      ATMs have been around for decades and so has online banking, but most all banks still have physical branches and multiple tellers behind the window.

      Actually, the number of bank tellers has plummeted. Also the number of bank branches has plummeted. But you are talking about an environment where people who would be bank tellers can get a different office-type job.

      We're talking about an environment where that can't happen, because there are no other jobs to take. Why hire a human when a robot and/or general purpose AI is far more profitable?

      Wait and see if that happens? That's a recipe for an awful and violent future where we suddenly have to change society, instead of a far more gradual transition.

    12. Re:They still don't fucking get it. by painandgreed · · Score: 2

      Look at rural and small town census tracts after the Great Recession -- there was no "after the recession" for them, it's still on. Sure they get lip service, but if you think anyone is going to prioritize the interests of an out-of-work coal miner over a fracking billionaire, consider that these are also the places which are ravaged by the opioid crisis. There's lots of posturing on that issue too, but no action. Drug wholesalers, over the course of two years, shipped nine million pills to a single pharmacy in West Virginia serving a community of less than four hundred people, and no politicians have proposed anything to prevent things like that happening again.

      59,000 people are killed in the US by the opioid crisis annually, the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every two weeks, but we must tread carefully lest we harm drug company profits. I submit to you that demonstrates the lower value we put on the lives of those people relative to the lives of bankers.

      If we can't be bothered lift a finger to save their lives, why would we save their jobs?

      My own theory on this, is that rural America is the new 'inner city'. As industry gets more complicated, desires more efficient supply chains, requires a nearby large pool of skilled employees, there is very little economic reason to be located in small towns that used to be supported by manufacturing companies effectively running company towns. The only real reason will be farming and natural resource mining, which are being greatly automated. Instead of urban decay, we are experiencing rural decay. Those that can are moving out, those left possibly can't, and will probably cry that they don't want handouts, just jobs, just like those suffering from urban decay did after WW2.

  3. Re:What a revolution... by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    But 57% of those will be women.

  4. Please stop telling people to reskill by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it didn't work when the blue collar jobs went overseas and it's not going to work now. That's because:

    a) older folks learn slower than young folks (fact)

    b) it's kinda hard to work full time supporting the family you made when you had a job and go to school full time.

    c) A lot of the folks being asked to re-skill didn't make it through college the first time when they were young and still had the support of their parents and access to scholarships only available to high school seniors

    d) Nobody wants to support these folks while they go back to school, since that means tax hikes and we just did a $1.5 trillion dollar tax _cut_.

    This is precisely why Hilary lost the election. Just telling them to reskill isn't an answer. It's not going to work. Think of something else or get ready for some pain while they elect God only knows what kind of people in a desperate attempt to find someone who will listen to them.

    --
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    1. Re:Please stop telling people to reskill by Nidi62 · · Score: 2

      it didn't work when the blue collar jobs went overseas and it's not going to work now. That's because: b) it's kinda hard to work full time supporting the family you made when you had a job and go to school full time.

      Did you even read the summary? From TFS:

      Report highlights the urgent need for a massive reskilling programme, safety nets to support workers while they reskill, and support with job-matching.

      And the summary is right. At some point we are either going to have to have massive retraining efforts, instill some sort of strong, robust social safety net (UBI, strong unemployment, whatever), or face the horribly destabilizing and violence-producing effects of massive numbers of idle, frustrated, unemployed people. It's your choice.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  5. Reskill into what? by apoc.famine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I skimmed the article to find out, and came up with this gem:

    According to this forecast, only one job family—Production—will experience an overall net job decline. However, both Production and Office and Administrative roles are set to experience a significant employment decline. Unlike Production, however, the Office and Administrative job family is forecast to experience sufficient new job gains as well in roles like Billing, Cost and Rate Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks, and Customer Service Representatives to counter-balance the shrinking of other occupational categories, such as Data Entry Keyers, File Clerks, Mail Clerks, and Administrative Assistants

    So one of their super amazing findings is that data entry people will reskill into receptionists, and we'll need a lot more of those.

    It seems to me that they don't have any idea what they're talking about. If you have less jobs under the Office and Administrative category from losing data based ones, you don't need more billing people and receptionists. And how is billing not going to see a similar reduction?

    They seem to miss the fundamental issue here, which is that we're quickly getting to the point of being able to replace all of the jobs they think that we'll need more of that we could fill with the people already being made redundant. Some how their magic math shows that we can just retrain people for existing jobs and then we'll suddenly need lots more people in those positions. If that doesn't happen, a lot of the article falls apart. If those jobs also start going away, they're arguing for exactly the wrong approach.

    I don't know about everyone else's office, but around here we're not hiring more receptionists and customer service reps. The trend is in the opposite direction, actually. Overall, just a rather fantastical article that seems detached from reality. It sounds good, and if you're selling retraining services, I bet it sounds even better.

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  6. Re:Not just automation by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    There might not be what you can "general AI" yet, but we do have computers that can beat the best "Go" masters on the planet. Also, with deep learning neural networks we are exploring how the human brain really works, so general AI is inevitable.

  7. Re:Fewer jobs for more people by Narcocide · · Score: 2

    The funny thing is, this used to be assumed common sense; that automation would eventually lead to ubiquitous lives of luxury for everyone. We were all supposed to be looking forward to being able to devote more time to art and love and health. Somewhere along the line people seem to have lost sight of the goal posts. Now they think that carrying the ball is a goal in and of itself.

    But how do you deal with a post-scarcity society when a clue is the one thing left that nobody can find?

  8. Re:Excuse to expand Government by mi · · Score: 2

    Economics 102: the very measure of the importance/value of anything is other people's willingness to pay for it.

    That is, if these people's labor really is valuable, they don't need my charity. But then either the report in TFA is wrong, or the report and you are talking about different people.

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  9. Re:They get it. by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Funny

    > so we need to bring in immigrants to do the jobs that American robots won't do.

    We have always used immigrants to do the jobs that no American will do.

    That's why all of Trump's wives are immigrants.

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  10. Re:They get it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That always cracks me up. In the past, you might have a peasant rebellion. These days, a single Sarin gas canister would get rid of not just an entire rebellion, but ensure it won't happen again, due to residual poison left in the area. Or, a single A10 with some BRRT.

    Sorry. Syria showed us what happens when revolutions happen. It just means a lot of dead stupid civilians, and showing that the people in charge can stay in charge. Revolution is impossible these days.

  11. Safety net generally means 6 months by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  12. As supply increases, value decreases by LostMyBeaver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  13. Re:Fewer jobs for more people by HiThere · · Score: 2

    We're already in that situation. There are lots of jobs that aren't actually necessary.

    One problem is, *some* jobs are necessary, and if some people need to work, they resent it when others don't. And *nobody* is willing to admit that their job is one of the unnecessary ones...at least not when their boss is listening.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  14. Re:germany has trade schools by uncqual · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think what Germany does makes a lot of sense. However, remember, that students are diverted into the "trade" path at a quite young age based on academic performance. I don't think that will fly in the US because parents will scream "discrimination" when their kid does poorly in school and is shunted to the trade school path -- even when it was the parent's failure to instill the value education, homework, and discipline into their spawn.

    And, almost anyone who ends up with $150K-$200K of student debt and doesn't have a degree that is in demand did something VERY stupid and probably -- or actually, a lot of things very stupid. It doesn't take long to figure out that a BA degree in Gender Studies with a minor in Ancient Greek Mythology after taking seven years to finish those degrees is going to qualify you for a job where the most important skills is asking "Would you like fries with that?".

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  15. Re:germany has trade schools by ctilsie242 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It can happen even if one has a relevant major. If one graduates into a crappy economy (like those who graduated December of 2008), student loans capitalize, and that much student debt can be easily amassed just through having to kick the can due to forbearances.

    The US is the only country which has this system where if one wants to better themselves, they have to mortgage their entire life. China, Russia, Chile, and most of Europe, college and/or trade programs are "free". They understand that if they want a "harvest" (i.e. skilled people), they have to plant "seeds" (as in education.) This is a fact that seems lost in the US.

  16. I don't know about bathroom remodeling by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    but I did IT for a closet & cabinet maker where not a single employee (including the owner) could do carpentry. They had a CNC machine. A sales guy would go out, do measurements, show you some packages and then a computer cut everything to fit. Then a couple guys with nails and hammers went out and banged it all together. If anything didn't fit it was because the measurements were wrong. You didn't 'em again, recut, and yelled at the sales guy not to screw up again.

    That's a really, really high skill job that's been turned into Ikea furniture by computers.

    Another example is my kid's invisalign braces. After the first set of prints were done she saw the orthodontist a total of 6 times for about 3 hours total; and she only saw him that much because her teeth needed some grinding and that takes a while. Everything else was done by computer in Israel. The invisalign were the same price as regular braces; but the regular braces would have needed bi weekly adjustments. With the invisalign she just swapped out clear plastic retainers.

    Oh, and don't get me started on how quick buildings go up now. I've seen high rises open in less than a year. The kind that used to take 5 times that when I was a wee lad. And most of that year was waiting for the city to complete inspections (underfunded inspection offices don't have enough manpower, so you wait a while).

    Point is, it's not just automation, it's massive amounts of skill reduction.

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