Are You Next?

 

In November of 2017, the prestigious McKinsey & Company (Global Institute) issued a report – Jobs Lost, Jobs gained: What future of work will mean for jobs, skills and wages – that outlined the impact of artificial intelligence (effectively sophisticated software that can learn, extrapolate and adjust as it analyzes data) on the job market by 2030. As the pandemic shut down businesses and factories, many corporations used this down time to implement or upgrade their automation capacity. Jobs where there is a necessary interface with real people – hospitality, or healthcare (with some serious changes expected) – or where some work simply is not amenable to centralized automation – like construction or certain aspects of agriculture – or the skills that actually expand knowledge and actually provide the data from AI analysis – like research, engineering and field work – may have greater protection.

The report was also issued before AI itself upped the ante in information technology, from the dissemination of disinformation and the “difficult to detect” deep fake audio-video imagery where a computer can replicate human facial and voice characteristics that are indiscernible from the real thing to the the tracking (including emotional reactions) of human movement and behavior. The McKinsey report suggested that by 2030, in a modest global AI displacement of jobs, 400 million people will lose their employment. In a more aggressive case, that number doubles. Those that will be forced to change their occupational category in a modest case would be 75 million with a more likely 375 million in a more rapid period of change.

Today, while there are pockets of employment that are still susceptible to being outsourced to overseas producers, that reality is decreasingly relevant for the overall job picture. Even China has prioritized AI in its manufacturing sectors, as it labor costs have become too high for true global competition. And while we have millions of unfilled jobs here in the United States, most of those holding back from taking those jobs are concerned about COVID, lack of childcare and pay not high enough to attract them back. But make no mistake, AI job displacement is accelerating even beyond the expectations of the McKinsey report. There are even AI programed machines that can perform surgery or draft complex legal documents. 

The other part of this equation is the failure of the US labor force to upgrade its skillset to what is truly in demand. “In a new interview, Dell Technologies (DELL) Chairman and CEO Michael Dell says automation will exacerbate that mismatch between the skills required by the workforce and ones on offer from people seeking employment — a trend that risks diminishing ‘opportunity for everyone,’ he says…

“While some of the founders of tech giants are among the world's richest people, their technological advances have not delivered comparable income gains for workers… Since the 1970s, technology has helped enable productivity growth of 61.8% while hourly pay has risen just 17.5%, according to a report updated last month by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

“The World Economic Forum, host of the annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, found in 2016 that technology had already worsened inequality in upper- and middle-income countries and would ‘eventually spread to the entire world.’

“‘One hundred years ago, most people could do pretty much every job that there was,’ Dell says. ‘Who can program robots and design spaceships and do brain surgery, come up with the algorithms and that sort of thing — fewer and fewer people.” Yahoo Finance, October 8th. We also tax those with growth assets vastly better than those who earn a living, only making income inequality that much worse. 

The severe shortage of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) workers was only exacerbated by immigration limitations instituted during the Trump administration. Other nations, notably Canada, Australia and the UK opened their doors to these tech experts who could not enter the United States under a severely curtailed H1B visa program, a process made even more difficult by the pandemic. There just aren’t enough qualified STEM workers in the United States, and so much of our job creation is dependent on the success of our STEM sectors.

US policy seems to show our Congress asleep at the switch. The last major immigration reform bill was passed during the Reagan Administration in 1986. STEM educated experts (including their families) are stymied from entering the US, and those competing nations noted above are now attracting big tech companies to their shores to shift their research and development away from the US. These STEM experts are the true job-creators. 

For the United States, once this pandemic passes and people feel safer about returning to work, we need a huge attitude shift in the development of new levels of needed skills. We do not need more undergrad majors in marketing and business; we need hard skill STEM education, even if these arenas are more challenging and perceived as less “fun.” It’s a severe race to elevate our overall skill levels a. to make the US more competitive and b. to insure that there will lots of new jobs with local US expertise to fill them. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we do not change how we approach STEM education, we will have generations of Americans who will simply be able to work at the bottom level jobs (e.g., hospitality, caregivers and construction).