"You know, massive unemployment is heading our way, as machines and AI start to replace jobs, we will have people out of work and the economy will crash, the world will fall into ruin and the four horsemen of the apocalypse will reign supreme!"
Ok, so maybe I embellished a little, but I'm sure you know the conversation I mean. There's a few things wrong with this assertion, because it makes an assumption without examining some underlying variables.
People have been predicting this tale of doom and gloom since the advent of the printing press if I'm not mistaken.
The first problem is the assumption that the workplace is static, this is simply not the case, we no longer have wheelwrights to fix our carriages or Coopers to build our barrels for us. Automation happens, roles change and new jobs are created as requirements change.
The second is that people can't adapt when the need arises. If a job becomes redundant, and people are faced with either adaptation or destitution, generally people adapt. This is simply life, the only thing that is inevitable in life is death and change. People adapt or people perish, the vast majority do the former, not the latter. As the the adapters change according to requirements, the educational system should also change, otherwise excited graduates find themselves coming out of education and needing to adapt right away because the education system failed to prepare them adequately.
The third is that automation and Artificial Intelligence are bad. They're not, our brains are evolving all of the time; a recent talk with an esteemed neuro-psychologist I know recently led to him explaining that kids are getting smarter all the time, literally decade by decade. The reason that educational testing is updated and revised constantly is because the intellectual norm is trending upwards with significant speed. Personally as a someone who works works extensively in the field of the "Internet of Things", I look to the future with only excitement and optimism, to a time when our future leaders, and workers get to use their brains for creatively solving complex, and multi-faceted problems.
But the crux of this, as I just mentioned, is whether the new additions to the workforce (kids currently in high school and college) are prepared for the task ahead. Indications are that the majority of them are not! To be clear, the jobs that are in jeopardy (subjectively speaking) are those that are easily replicated and require repetitive tasks performed or where the job uses commodity knowledge. As an example a lot of the legal research work for litigation previously done by lawyers, is often now performed by para-legal staff. The knowledge is commoditised, and with more and more data being digitised, and search algorithms being tweaked and improved continually, I suspect it won't be long before accredited administrative staff will be able to do the same work, in the style of the Mechanical Turk, as we already see with transcription and other services as provided by Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
The value for employers provided by workers of the future is not in commodity knowledge, it's in the ability to solve complex problems in a contextually creative way.
As a side-note the ultimate end for this progression of automation in the workforce looks something like an asymptote style graph, which would eventually take us to a zero marginal cost society. This essentially means as new technology is invented and adopted it becomes cheaper and more accessible, which means that eventually, a great deal of work will be done almost for free, and as a result, money becomes less important to society as a whole. As an example, think of Star Trek, where almost everything is "replicated" (so no need to buy food and other items.). There's a great discussion about the Star Trek post-scarcity economy here and this post doesn't need to spend space repeating it, so you can read about it here.
In short, the future is exciting, the Internet of Things will fundamentally change the way that we interact and consume the world around us in a beneficial way. Self-driving cars are already upon us, in the next decade they will be commoditised. As the parent of visually-impaired children who otherwise would have no chance at personal transportation, this alone brings me excitement. The future is bright, are the leaders of the future up to the challenge?
The first problem is the assumption that the workplace is static, this is simply not the case, we no longer have wheelwrights to fix our carriages or Coopers to build our barrels for us. Automation happens, roles change and new jobs are created as requirements change.
The second is that people can't adapt when the need arises. If a job becomes redundant, and people are faced with either adaptation or destitution, generally people adapt. This is simply life, the only thing that is inevitable in life is death and change. People adapt or people perish, the vast majority do the former, not the latter. As the the adapters change according to requirements, the educational system should also change, otherwise excited graduates find themselves coming out of education and needing to adapt right away because the education system failed to prepare them adequately.
The third is that automation and Artificial Intelligence are bad. They're not, our brains are evolving all of the time; a recent talk with an esteemed neuro-psychologist I know recently led to him explaining that kids are getting smarter all the time, literally decade by decade. The reason that educational testing is updated and revised constantly is because the intellectual norm is trending upwards with significant speed. Personally as a someone who works works extensively in the field of the "Internet of Things", I look to the future with only excitement and optimism, to a time when our future leaders, and workers get to use their brains for creatively solving complex, and multi-faceted problems.
But the crux of this, as I just mentioned, is whether the new additions to the workforce (kids currently in high school and college) are prepared for the task ahead. Indications are that the majority of them are not! To be clear, the jobs that are in jeopardy (subjectively speaking) are those that are easily replicated and require repetitive tasks performed or where the job uses commodity knowledge. As an example a lot of the legal research work for litigation previously done by lawyers, is often now performed by para-legal staff. The knowledge is commoditised, and with more and more data being digitised, and search algorithms being tweaked and improved continually, I suspect it won't be long before accredited administrative staff will be able to do the same work, in the style of the Mechanical Turk, as we already see with transcription and other services as provided by Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
The value for employers provided by workers of the future is not in commodity knowledge, it's in the ability to solve complex problems in a contextually creative way.
As a side-note the ultimate end for this progression of automation in the workforce looks something like an asymptote style graph, which would eventually take us to a zero marginal cost society. This essentially means as new technology is invented and adopted it becomes cheaper and more accessible, which means that eventually, a great deal of work will be done almost for free, and as a result, money becomes less important to society as a whole. As an example, think of Star Trek, where almost everything is "replicated" (so no need to buy food and other items.). There's a great discussion about the Star Trek post-scarcity economy here and this post doesn't need to spend space repeating it, so you can read about it here.
In short, the future is exciting, the Internet of Things will fundamentally change the way that we interact and consume the world around us in a beneficial way. Self-driving cars are already upon us, in the next decade they will be commoditised. As the parent of visually-impaired children who otherwise would have no chance at personal transportation, this alone brings me excitement. The future is bright, are the leaders of the future up to the challenge?
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