'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.

Comments

Reskilling is a horrible word

[Billy the Mountain]

I liked retraining better.

Re:Reskilling is a horrible word

[ceoyoyo]

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.

They still don't fucking get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Hizonner]

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.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[bettodavis]

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.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[geekmux]

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.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[Freischutz]

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'.

Re:They still don't fucking get it.

[hey!]

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?

Please stop telling people to reskill

[rsilvergun]

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.

Reskill into what?

[apoc.famine]

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.

Re:They get it.

[DickBreath]

> 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.

Safety net generally means 6 months

[rsilvergun]

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.

As supply increases, value decreases

[LostMyBeaver]

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

Re:germany has trade schools

[uncqual]

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?".

Re:germany has trade schools

[ctilsie242]

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.