Alexa, Will I Lose My Job to Automation in the Next Decade?

Back when I was a child, most working Americans stayed in the same job for over two-decades. Today, the average US worker changes jobs every 4.2 years. Not only are jobs facing obsolescence; entire industries, former mega-corporations, veer towards a comparable fate. I watched as two of our three biggest automakers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Brick and mortar retailers have dropping like termites under a fumigation tent. The latest marquee names include Sears and Toys R Us. Change is accelerating.

It doesn’t take genius to understand that getting a post-high school education has never been more important. And while 59% of Millennials have at least some college, they are burdened with staggering levels of student loan debt and face an ever-changing job landscape, one that will require them to embrace a lifetime of constant retraining just to survive. That companies are morphing (merging, going out of business or restructuring), jobs are increasingly part-time or gig-related but obviously not “employment for life,” suggests job insecurity and a necessary separation of healthcare, retirement and other benefits from specific employment. Our social system is simply not configured to deal with these changes.

Notwithstanding government pledges and policies to the contrary – from Trump’s global tariff wars and support of removing financial/environmental regulations – resource extraction and heavy industry are or will inevitably face precipitous decline in the immediate future. No amount of presidential promising, for example, is going to reverse a global aversion to “dirty coal” power generation. Jobs focused on green alternative energy are exploding just as Donald Trump is fighting to return to jobs in the fossil fuel sector.

No gloating over our massive rise in oil extraction is going to give increasingly automated wildcatters new finds of yet undiscovered, commercially accessible and massive petroleum reserves in the US. They remain reliant on rapidly dwindling vestigial secondary oil in old fields; fracking cannot extract oil from fully depleted drilling sites (visit this harsh reality in my September 6^th The Fracks of Life blog). The clock is ticking.

Big tariffs on steel and aluminum cannot make the relatively tiny American domestic providers generate well-priced products to meet local needs without horrific costs to those American manufacturers – and their workers – who rely on these metals. The staggering increase in construction costs, the lay-offs within the automotive industry, are just tip of a very destructive iceberg.

Trump’s anti-globalization initiatives reflect issues that lost prioritized significance well over decade ago. So much yesterday’s news. Many economic experts, including Trump’s own former chief economic advisor and ex-Goldman Sachs CEO, Gary Cohen, see a sizeable trade imbalance as a sign of a successful economy. After all, they note, we brought all those discounted goods and services into the United States… we did not give money away to anyone.

Alienating allies and opponents around the world by withdrawing from or denigrating international agreements, adding mounting trade barriers, and it doesn’t help when we tell just about everyone that “America First” means we do not care about their needs and are quite willing to go it alone. Bringing manufacturing back to the United States may serve those rich companies well-invested in smart automation, but it hardly is a creator of good new American jobs, particularly among the vast horde of under-trained disenfranchised American blue-collar workers. The impact of automation, not globalization, remains our biggest economic issue.

The October 14^th Los Angeles Times drills down into the details: “In the post-Great Recession landscape, the prospect of getting a well-paying job with just a high school degree is dim… ‘The challenge in the economy right now is that the kind of jobs that are being created are either at the lowest wages or the very highest wages,’ [Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California’s community college system] said.

“The rise of automation has sparked considerable angst among American workers. A 2017 Pew poll found that 72% of adults said they were worried about a future where robots and computers can perform human jobs.

“But there’s no consensus on what the future will look like. One 2013 study, which [Johannes Moenius, an economics professor at the University of Redlands] used to build his analysis, estimated that 47% of American jobs were at risk of being automated. A 2016 paper pegged that figure at a much lower 9%.

“A study in 2017 posited that between 23% and 44% of work hours in the United States will be automated by 2030 — particularly in jobs with a high degree of repetition such as machinists, office support and retail sales. But that study also said jobs would be added in the future, especially among care providers such as surgeons and nurses, and construction workers.

“Artificial intelligence — computers performing tasks typically done by humans — takes many forms. Computer vision, which allows machines to glean information from what they see, can be used in agriculture to give crops water and pesticides based on a plant’s needs.

“Virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa are being used in hotels, standing in for concierges or front desk assistants. Self-driving vehicles could upend the country’s transportation and logistics sectors, but it’s not clear how quickly those cars and trucks will be widely deployed… ‘Depending on who you talk to, that’s a couple of years away or 30 years away,’ said Stephen Baiter, executive director of the Oakland Workforce Development Board.

“It’s one thing for a technological breakthrough to be invented, and it’s another to see businesses adopt that technology on a large scale. Experts predict the impact on jobs will not be a sudden thunderclap — more like a rolling wave…

“Much of the attention has centered on a gulf in the labor market. Companies continue to seek workers with college degrees. But in California, [for example,] 8 million workers between the ages of 24 and 62 ended their studies in high school. To close that gap, some advocate more emphasis on certificates and other types of credentials that show off a worker’s specific skills.

“‘We should focus on what an employee can do, not just their background or pedigree or educational attainment,’ said David Marsh, who manages the Rework America Task Force at the Markle Foundation.

“Others fear that deemphasizing degrees could exacerbate inequality… ‘You end up stratifying your workforce,’ said Lande Ajose, executive director of California Competes, a higher-education advocacy group. ‘You end up with people who have wealth or privilege who continue to get four-year degrees, and everyone else ends up with some kind of degree that is less than that.’

“‘It’s a really vexing problem — what do you do with that existing workforce where the occupations that are in demand are changing all around them?’ said Kish Rajan, former leader of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. ‘They’re going to need new training, new skill-set development to be competitive.’

“Chris McGarry, chief administrative officer of the Save Mart grocery company, said his business has never seen technology as a means to ‘strip out labor.’… But he does envision redeploying those who work at cash registers and in stockrooms, where technology can help trim costs, to positions that interact with customers, which he sees as a necessity to compete with e-retailers like Amazon.

“For the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents grocery clerks, that means figuring out a pathway to move cashiers to other parts of the store, such as the butcher counter and prepared food section. The union is looking to apprenticeships, which have long been favored by construction and firefighters unions, as a training pipeline; a new law will expand apprenticeship to nontraditional fields such as healthcare, retail and cannabis.”

There is an innate prejudice in Trumpland for incumbent powers and practices, no matter how obsolete or shortsighted, even as the rest of the world embraces scientific facts and technological advances. We are rapidly losing our competitive edge by believing we can turn back the clock and live off the investments of past generations with artificial economic barriers, archaic retro-policies and a dearth of going forward government investments in education, infrastructure and research.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we seem to have adopted a head-in-the-sand, mind-numbing view to our own future… which we could easily call the “Make America the Biggest Loser” strategy.