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Bank of England Chief Economist Warns On AI jobs Threat (bbc.com)
The chief economist of the Bank of England has warned that the UK will need a skills revolution to avoid "large swathes" of people becoming "technologically unemployed" as artificial intelligence makes many jobs obsolete. From a report: Andy Haldane said the possible disruption of what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be "on a much greater scale" than anything felt during the First Industrial Revolution of the Victorian era. He said that he had seen a widespread "hollowing out" of the jobs market, rising inequality, social tension and many people struggling to make a living. It was important to learn the "lessons of history", he argued, and ensure that people were given the training to take advantage of the new jobs that would become available. He added that in the past a safety net such as new welfare benefits had also been provided.
We can't all be doctors. And even if we could whose going to pay us when the jobs base collapses and with it wages? This is the same sort of nonsense I heard when the manufacturing jobs went overseas and again when the tech jobs fooled them. It was biotech last time, but this time they're not even saying what I'm supposed to retrain for...
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banks like student loans
We are a solved specie. In the future even the majority of developer jobs will be automated. Systems will be fully automated with a fully non-human supply chain, economy, and customers. I am looking forward to seeing "100% human made" on products as opposed to what the automated systems will create. At this rate, it will come in our lifetimes.
The sad truth is that a large proportion of the UK is under the impression that chucking out all the Eastern Europeans who stand in cold fields plucking cabbages 12 hours a day will solve the job problem.
You can remove the low skilled workers if you want, but sooner or later (most likely sooner) a robot will take their place anyway.
"We must become masters of our AI overlords"
without people to pay.
Money's purpose is to manage a human workforce.
people were given the training to take advantage of the new jobs that would become available
Which jobs are these?
Have gnu, will travel.
How do you train, say, a lorry (truck) driver whose being replaced by AI-powered self-driving lorries? If the training involves a desk with a computer... one person can manage several of those self-driving lorries, so you might re-train a few. What do you suggest for the rest?
Compound that with the fact that people generally find the job that is intellectually right for them. If the lorry driver was capable of being Elon Musk, then he probably wouldn't have been a lorry driver in the first place, or at least as a stepping stone and not for long.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
What a completely shitty place that will be!
Easy solution, complex implementation.
For centuries, we have measured peoples "smarts" on their ability to remember things, focus on a task, and be able to work out problems quickly.
Skills like imagination, out of the box thinking, creativity, people relations... A lot of soft skills that havn't been associated with "smart" people, but with people who get kicked out of school, because they didn't fit the mold.
With AI and robotics taking a lot of the jobs away, this is actually an opportunity for a "Kindness Economy" Where a lot of these jobs that are making us miserable and irritable people are being handled by computers, leaving opportunity to work more with people and help them with their problems. Vs. being a cog in the wheel causing their problems.
A "Kindness economy" will be difficult to setup. Changing over a century of culture, changes in education, and human relation expectations. While there still be jobs for the Anti-social people, they will be less in demand, and probably not needed to be filled with the random social person making their jobs even more miserable.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
First of all, it will probably be a very distant future (if possible at all) to automate every single link in the production chain. Apart from the production itself there is logistics, sales, marketing, design, retail, HR, maintenance, IT and a whole bloody industry around it. I have hard times imagining a full automation of everything.
Secondly, added value appears when the product is sold, not when it is produced and waiting in the storage. And it is sold to humans which exchange their earned money for it working for some company (yeah, no robots). And they pay taxes, so even the holy UBI is paid by the working class, not by robots.
So you can have a 100% automated factory producing one million socks per second but who's gonna buy them if people are unemployed because of robots and what kind of revenue would you have.
Any Labor Ecomomist will tell you the least educated are getting the stick. No High school - you will be worthless.Non-English speaking immigrant maybe aged - not good. That all the univertity clerks have a degree for simple admin is in itself an overkill.
The over educated and more youthful grab the spots of others - as any employer would.
Them dishwashers are well educated.
20% of the lowest pass university degrees will be lucky to get any job, let alone a return on their investment. Skills revolution is a code word for lower wages and conditions and greater employer exploitation and gig tasks. It wont go away as incomes have stalled while housing and other non-discresionary fixed costs have risen. Yeah, they know they need to yank the safety net and unemployment benefits. They know alright.
The cause is not AI. It is global labor arbitrage, and internationalism lowering British living standards. The trick is politicians want to paint the picture of hope, not 'going backwards'.
Time to vote in party C and the A and B incumberants are lying scum.
I think what you really need from a negotiating stand point is a really, really hard Brexit.
The harder the better.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Yeah. Fuck you, I got mine!
Well put, though in the specific example it takes a modicum of intelligence and a lot of diligence to be a truck driver. You could probably learn a skilled trade. (Heck, you could probably finish your career before we actually have self-driving vehicles.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And when all lorry drivers learn skilled trades? As a person who is having a lot of renovation work done I look forward to the day there are 100, or even 20, electricians in my area begging for work. More likely a good one will accept a minimum wage rate.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
With every new generation of technology has come threats to low end jobs. The problem is that we are getting to the point where even mid-range jobs may be taken by automation. Now, to be fair, we are still looking at low end jobs that are being threatened by technology, mostly in the form of those who take orders for items. Ordering food that requires no adjustment to the menu items at all can already be done via an app. It won't take long before in-store food ordering kiosks reduce the need for people in the ordering process. Even the ability to specialize an order should be easily available to customers.
Food preparation is also getting close to being something that can be automated(pizza robots for example). Now, this stuff doesn't require much in the way of AI, and even self driving cars, many people already get driving routes via GPS/apps, and being able to re-route based on traffic conditions would be a basic form of AI, so taxi services, even the driving of trucks might become automated.
In the medium-term, humans will still be needed for maintenance and to handle mechanical failures, but in the longer term, AI will handle maintenance as well. Medical technology will move to AI, simply because the cost of education plus malpractice will make it so being a doctor is more of a headache, and medical robots won't require downtime/rest the way humans do. In the end, civilization will need to change, because people with limited ability to figure out what they want to do and without the ability to contribute in a positive way will simply be a drain on the resources of the planet(or universe).
One thing we can count on is that there WILL be a war between the wealthy and those who actually work for a living(or try to). Training for jobs that in turn will be eliminated by AI makes the future a lot more of a challenge, so figuring out how to provide services that AI just can't do, to adapt to unusual circumstances, that is the future.
I will note that we can at least be happy with the knowledge that most lawyers will end up being rendered obsolete, and without the skills to figure out what to do, because most of them can't figure out solutions to problems, and only point to those who already had to figure out solutions to the same problem.
Oh and since we now have the 'gig economy', they can buy all their supplies, tools, and a ride to the job site with that minimum wage as well. No need for the customer to cover expensive overhead.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
As with everyone who things we "measure intelligence wrong", you should take a look at the Big Five personality traits. Those plus IQ explain all statistically measurable factors of human psychology.
What schools measure is intelligence plus conscientiousness, which is probably what matters on most jobs as well. Your "kindness economy", euphemistic at best, would be jobs for people who are high in agreeableness. Problem is, stubborn people need jobs too. Further, we already have a large economy around elder care, and that's only going to grow until the Boomers die off, so there's your existing "kindness sector" in our economy.
Only communists "set up" an economy, mostly by starving millions of people to death. Successful economies emerge naturally over time, as people who have needs seek people with the skills to provide for those needs. There will certainly be new jobs, and many of them may be "kindness-related", but you can't force it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You mean like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Yes, we need it very hard and hairy. The only problem is that it will not be only for the fans, everyone will get shafted.
To paraphrase a TV commercial for an energy bar and Doctor Who.
There is a difference between Nice and Kind.
Nice is the person with a big smile who makes you feel good.
Kind is working to help someone with their long term goals.
So for example say currently your job is to approve or reject a license, say to build home extensions. You have a large collection of applications to deal with. You could be a perfectly pleasant person, but will rubberstamp reject on the bulk of them. Leaving the requester having no idea on what the next steps are.
With this process automated, in the "Kindness Economy" A person would deal with the rejected list, and help the requester out to make sure the rejected reasons are dealt with and addressed so they will be able to put out an acceptable application. This job, may require the person to be tough and tell them the hard news, however that may be needed for the customer to go further.
I was not implying that we force this "Kindness Economy" but more of a prediction of that is where the natural progression probably will be in. And that we should prep for this. Just as my generation had kids learn how to use computers, write simple programs, because back in Gen X, The Computer Revolution (or "Data Economy" ) That we live in now, was only a prediction of things to come, but those pre-boomers and early boomers decided it was a good idea to adapt to this change. As their grandparents prepped them for the industrial revolution.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or maybe if you have some other pointless 'administrative' job. The people who actually create things and build things will always have work because until we have real, 'general' AI that can think like a human being, and not the shitty half-assed excuse for AI they keep trotting out these days 'robots' won't be able to produce things that are as high-quality as a skilled human being can -- and shitty so-called 'deep learning software' will never be able to really, truly create things like a human being can, let alone innovate. This 'Bank of England Chief Economist' tosser is just another Chicken Little running around waving his arms about the sky falling.
A halcyon call to re-education for re-employment ignores reality that there will be no employment to re-educate displaced jobless. Its platitude. It is so last century.
Tesla ' autopilot' categorically decimated ' private car ownership' i.e. FORD halted car production in US. AI is not even fun to drive much less fun paying for the thrill to own a car that has it.
Steampunk has arrived
How do you train, say, a lorry (truck) driver whose being replaced by AI-powered self-driving lorries?
Same way you train anyone else. You just train/teach them to do something OTHER than driving a truck. They're probably not going to stay in the shipping industry. Same way that all those weavers never found work as weavers after the automated looms took over. "Trucker" as a profession will simply be gone.
The problem is that training and education has diminishing returns on the old. Which is why we send kids to school. Nobody wants to give a 50 years old a scholarship because they'll be dead or looking to retire in a mere 20 years.
1) Teach kids the skills they need for tomarrow.
2) Retrain, teach young adults that are displaced by disruptive technologies.
3) Early retire with a shitty-ass pension the elderly with no other options. It's got to be shitty because we WANT them to go find alternatives. But just throwing them to the curb would be cruel. For us in the USA over here, it'd be something like handing out exceptions that lower the age for Social Security.
4) Don't forget that the government giving away free money to institutions will raise prices. You ALSO have to encourage additional competition in academia and tech schools.
There is currently a serious labor shortage in the skilled trades. It's likely good work for someone with the skills to drive a truck. There are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled in the US right now.
We could do a better job as a society of making training available, but it's really not the people who already do skilled work that will be left out in the cold here. Unskilled labor has been going away for decades now, and will eventually vanish. What the heck happens to the 10% or 15% of people who simply can't cut it in a skilled job?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, I wouldn't call that a kindness economy, but I could certainly see jobs expediting permitting.
Personally, I already see a lot of new jobs around convenience - things people could do for themselves, but wold rather not be bothered. I've seen startups around car washing, lawn mowing, pickup/deliver clothes to the cleaners, and similar. All new companies, internet-dispatched, paying better than you'd think. Talking to a friend at a startup where they send people to wash your car, they pay $20/hr, which isn't bad at all for semi-skilled labor. They make a nice profit, and are growing like crazy.
As with every previous economic revolution, the new jobs will be doing things for the middle class that, previously, only the rich could afford. Wish I had a better idea for what, specifically, as I'd make my own startup.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes the end of the world as we know it. It may mean lots of lost opportunities. It may also mean lots of new ones. We will never know for sure whether brexit is better than no brexit and staying with the big EU 'democracy'. Try to make the best out of it.
The labor shortage is good for people in skilled trades. It's a good thing because it keeps their wages up. End that and people struggle to survive.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You can master skilled trades all you want, your wage will always be capped by the number of people in your trade.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Now we're talking about working for minimum wage all night. So awesome.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
that everyone could live a comfy life with barely having to work at all.
YES, and compared to the age when fields had to be harvested with a sickle and mines had to be dug with pickaxes and hammer, nearly anyone CAN live a "comfy" life with doing barely any hard labor at all.
BUT, the definition of "comfy" has changed. If you're ok with sleeping on a cobble-stone floor in the common room, some ways from the hearth, then GOOD NEWS! If you demand your own bedroom and wifi and air-conditioning, then you're going to have to work for it.
But if you live in a developed nation, they likely have some sort of welfare program. If you want to live on the bottom rung of society, we'll take care of you. But you have to play nice and jump through some hoops. If you want to live an easy life of luxury, go build your own robots. If you don't know how to do that, or simply don't want to, you're not exactly contributing to society and probably shouldn't be preaching about "leeches".
"AI" (which we don't actually have yet)
Sure, whatever. If your job can be replaced by "NOT REALLY AI", then it's functionally equivalent.
Teach kids the skills they need for tomarrow.
What skills would those be ?
As a person who is having a lot of renovation work done I look forward to the day there are 100, or even 20, electricians in my area begging for work.
Electricians control the supply of electricians. They've lobbied for laws which require that new electricians apprentice themselves to existing electricians, which sets an upper limit on the potential growth of the number of electricians. [A subset of] Doctors have achieved the same thing WRT the supply of doctors through the lobbying efforts of their trade organization, the AMA. The day when there are all those electricians in your area begging for work will never come, at the current rate. And the rate is artificially limited by people with effective lobbyists, so it's not likely to change soon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A "Kindness economy" will be difficult to setup.
We literally cannot get from here to there without a revolution, because the people in charge of all the money now are so vehemently opposed to being kind. We know this because they are sitting on literally more money than they can possibly spend, but are unwilling to give it away to make the world a better place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've got youtuber and twitch streamer. I'll add Crypto currency miner (I don't include the traders, they had those when I was a kid; we called them "stockbrokers"). I'm 40 and there were programmers when I was a kid, so you don't get that.
Those jobs employ very, very few full time. Meanwhile automation eliminated millions of factory jobs and is about to do away with drivers, warehouse workers and cashiers. And that's just the ones I can rattle off. Hell, I used to do IT for a cabinet maker that couldn't make cabinets. They measured your kitchen and/or closet and the CNC cut everything for them. After that it was Ikea furniture with nicer wood.
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maybe another 2 to learn how to shoot if you need snipers. Then he's off to the trenches. Hey, it worked the last time. After all, if we blow it all up we're be back to full employment in no time rebuilding it.
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Posted below, but here it is. The common refrain is STEM:
Science: Make sure you get more than a BS. What do you do with a BS in physics? Teach highschool.
Technology: Because politicians are too dumb to distinguish between sysadmins and programmers. This is like.... everything the slahdot crowd does.
Engineering: It's all the other fields, but with more bloody paperwork and an extra $30K.
Math: Practically nobody is employed as an actual mathematician, but holy shit is it useful everywhere else. It's like the Jack-of-all-Trades skill from Traveller but for the job market.
And also business, because with all the disruptive tech, there's opportunity for people to carve out their niche. Mostly likely to be swallowed up by some megacorp, but they get rich in the process and the megacorp (in theory) gets new capabilities.
Hired a plumber recently? Electrician? AC repair? They aren't just barely getting by. It's a labor shortage when it stops being a matter of price, and becomes one of availability. We have cultural issues preventing people from taking good jobs they could do.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All of the above; as we are renovating our whole house. I'd say they're comfortable, but they're not driving new vehicles around. Low-middle class to dead center middle class. Not upper middle class.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
OMG, they do the same thing as 'corrupt' taxi drivers??
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
AIs do the jobs humans don't want to do.
Seriously though... this is fear-mongering about the WRONG damned thing. AIs are not out to steal your jobs. Your BOSS is out to buy something that will do your job without requiring time off to take its little AI kids to soccer practice or whatever.
What fresh hell will this do to human society? How specifically is this the harbinger of the end-of-days?
It's not. We have lots of problems, many cited in the story, such as income inequality, etc. But AI isn't doing that any more than the advent of the motorized automobile destroyed society by putting farriers and saddlers, etc., out of work. They just ended up having to get new skills and do new jobs.
The "cotton 'gin" didn't end society despite automating the weaving of cloth (or whatever a cotton 'gin does,) making (whatever it does) probably about less than 10% as labor-intensive as it was before. The weavers found something else to do, I'm sure, by and large. The combine didn't end civilization by automating the collection of stalks of wheat, corn, and barley, hay, etc., etc., etc., it just made gathering natural inputs to other businesses more efficient, making it easier for the next step in the process to add value, (sorry about all these buzz words, folks, but they DO apply in this case,) resulting in increased gross output of our society, applying downward pressure on prices, raising the cap on the sheer volume of what we produced, which had a chain-reaction effect of making everything that depended on those products as inputs in some way to theirs to be made in greater abundance, increasing the quality of life, life-expectancy, etc., for many segments of society.
Rather, as a result, some, perhaps many of the people whose jobs were eliminated by the combine got jobs working the corn-flaking machines, giving rise to a whole new way to eat breakfast.
(While I'm sure it's true, it needs to be said, that some people benefited a lot damn more than others, that's kind of beside the point. The point was that humans are flexible, adaptable, and imaginative problem-solvers, and unless and until AI is able to solve every problem any human could possibly solve, there's still a need for us. Also, I rather doubt AI will reach the point of being any meaningful danger any time soon.)
Getting back to the topic, the digital electronic computer made human number-crunching professionals very nearly obsolete. Did they experience a mass die-off? No, they put their brain-power to different problems, too complex to be handled by the poor, stupid, dim-witted 8-bit computing devices that were able to replace them on tasks like, "add up this column of 500 numbers, then divide it by the result of step 14, and if the remainder is a non-terminating, repeating decimal..." and probably a lot of them took new jobs programming the very computers that replaced them.
SURE, it's true, some people can't or won't adapt. But to shake your fists at the bosses who replace you with a machine that can do your job better and cheaper is, looked at the situation from another perspective, like demanding that the boss, because he hired you, is obliged to pay you for EVER. That brings with it numerous problems, and it is besides unfair, and would tend to discourage people hiring folks in the FIRST place, if they know they're going to be punished for offering you a job to begin with, at some point down the road.
There is good in recognizing the virtue of an honest day's work, and in protecting the rights of laborers, but to pretend that businesses are all 100% evil, parasitic monsters, (the big ones I would more easily argue are that, more often, per capita, than the little ones,) but the way to solve this problem and many others facing us isn't to piss yourselves over AI stealing your job, and making moves to outlaw AI research, etc. That's like trying to plug a hole in a dam from the side the water's coming OUT of, rather than plugging the whole from the backside, with something that can withstand t
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
As automation and machine learning overtake more and more jobs, the fear is that there just won't be enough new jobs to absorb all the workers that are displaced. And don't for a minute believe that doctors, programmers, and other highly skilled jobs are forever safe.
What happens when the elites decide that the masses are too much of a liability and not enough of an asset?
The existing current plumbers? They're not losing their jobs. Neither are all the people currently training to be plumbers. Everyone that employs plumbers will of course complain that there's a lack of plumbers, the same way that the tech companies complain about a lack of tech workers. Which is "we don't like paying them so much".
But yeah, sure, it's good to remind kids that the trades are also a viable career path. Especially if you can't pass calculus.
(Home plumbing has gotten way easier these days now that everything is plastic. Still kind of a bitch, but easier.)
The guys who own the plumbing businesses do quite well, but starting your own small business (and succeeding) will always be the most valuable skill.
They're all "working class", by the way. It's not a dirty word. In fact, that's the cultural problem we need to fix. Especially the realization that a good working class job beats a crappy white-collar job any day. The difference is not one of how much you're paid, but the kind of work you do.
The point at which the lifetime earnings of a dentist (net of education costs) pass the lifetime earnings of a plumber is the early 40s. And that's comparing the dentist who owns his own business to the plumber who doesn't. If the plumber is successfully running a "two truck shop" by 40, the dentist may never pass him.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, it does matter how much you get paid. Maybe some people like going to another person's house or business to sit on the floor for hours, but you would have to pay me a lot more to do that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
ensure that people were given the training to take advantage of the new jobs that would become available
What new jobs? AI engineer, AI salesperson, and AI journalist?
People have more leisure time now then 100 years ago. Birth rates are lower.
hmmm, probably every hour worked and every paycheck. I'm not sure if that's "training" or "spotting a trend". But that whole capitalism thing has worked out pretty well for me.
But I CAN save you. At long as you're a citizen in my country. I'm paying to keep you on the dole after all. No worries, you're welcome. We've honestly got plenty.
Gah, what's the point with anonymous crackpots though?
The difference between "working class" and "middle class" in America is not one of income, nor is the difference between "middle class" and "upper class". The middle class tends to make more than the working class, on average, but that's not what distinguishes the two, and there's a lot of overlap in income.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The difference is that the working class generally do jobs that are physical and hard on the body. Which is exactly why not everyone wants to do those jobs.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yes, it is terrible that electricians should have to learn to be competent, rather than just make it up and cause an electrical fault that burns your house down.
The part that makes sure that doesn't happen is the examination, not the apprenticeship. Except it actually doesn't do that, it only makes it more rare. The apprenticeship should not be mandatory, and the examination should be better — maybe harder, maybe more hands-on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sure, and we've developed too much of a cultural aversion to those jobs. Given the stream of people replaced by robots we expect, I think it's time to fix that. It does seem to be where the new jobs are, as the "real work"-adverse middle class is willing to pay for it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, I know a couple of people who did these jobs as their career, and by age 50 their backs and knees were destroyed and they couldn't do those jobs any more. Now what? Our medical care will fix them up somewhat but they can't do those jobs any more.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
There is currently a serious labor shortage in the skilled trades. It's likely good work for someone with the skills to drive a truck. There are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled in the US right now.
We could do a better job as a society of making training available, but it's really not the people who already do skilled work that will be left out in the cold here. Unskilled labor has been going away for decades now, and will eventually vanish. What the heck happens to the 10% or 15% of people who simply can't cut it in a skilled job?
You need to make the salaries in the skilled and semiskilled trades attractive. When a waitress has to live from her tips, that is not what "American" humanity is about.
We need to rethink the concept of work
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
So you've essentially described a group of people occupying roughly the upper end of a bell curve.
What do you do with the 25-50% of the population on the lower end that can't do this?
Because if you let them get poor and desperate, they're certainly capable of bashing your head in and taking your stuff.
The world is fully of people who are probably in the 90% IQ range: Just slightly less smart than average.
They're not bad, they're not lazy, they're not useless: but they are incapably of doing a lot of mental heavy lifting often required of the tasks listed above.
I have just had a 50ish year old lorry (truck) driver to my tutor classes to learn how to work a computer. He had in 28 years of driving never needed to use a computer. Now his company wants to promote him to a desk job using a computer. /off buttons to them.
He will probably be Ok, but there are many folk of 50s plus who have never handled a computer or used one.
Their TV or Car management computers are just on
Regards Eion MacDonald
"Can't do this"? Harsh. These people aren't worthless. They just can't figure out calculus or architect 15 different bloody packages all working cross purpose.
I think we need code janitors. The grunts in charge of.... all that worthless shit that gets tossed around in code reviews. And to have the arduous task of pulling in legacy software and just documenting what it currently does. They don't have to write code, they might not even have a need to read it. We need a "tech school" of programming.
And we DO need people to teach highschool physics.
Help desks need workers.
SWQA isn't glorious at all, but it's vital and needed. Mostly paperwork checking, but all those Internet of Things devices could sorely use some more test.
Soooooo much of engineering isn't that hard. It's just crossing t's and dotting i's. If you employed an independent team of minimum wage quality checkers, even if they only caught something a fourth of the time as the high'n'mighty engineers, they'd pay for themselves. ...uh... The world has 1,930,182,352 people with an IQ of below 90 (and more every ~2 seconds). That's the bottom 25%. By definition.