Technological growth within this past decade alone has really changed the way we live our lives and how we operate. Socially, technology continues to innovate ways for humanity to connect on a scale never before seen in our brief history and how our workforce operates, technology forever affects how we focus on manual labor, services, and transportation. The era of automation has allowed us to be more efficient in all aspects of life, but the main concern of automation that’s been creeping up on us is that if our economy would be able to keep up as technology continues to grow? Our government must realize that to keep our economy strong with robotic automation taking over jobs in the future, our problem lies within our declining manual workforce and that we must re-tool our education system to help the economy benefit from robotic automation.

Robotic automation of our workforce draws the question of whether our economy can keep up with the ever advancing robotic technology. Some Economic Scientists such as David Ricardo and Nobel Prize Winner Wassily Leontief believe that robotic automation would increase our standard of living, but would create an economic issue that they have dubbed as “technological unemployment. “ Technological unemployment is based on the idea that as lower skill set jobs continually get replaced by autonomous robotic tech, the economy will not be able to sustain and create enough jobs to cover the replaced workers.

Bill Gates — Co-Founder of Microsoft — spoke on the subject of robotic automation in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute, and what he said was, “Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set… 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.” Gate’s believes that the government and businesses aren’t preparing well enough for the transition from manual to autonomous. If we continue the way we are today, we’ll be left with a high percentage of unemployed workers.

According to the predicted figures given by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), from the years of 2013-2016, there will be over 94,000 new service robots implemented in professional industries. Comparing the figure to the 126,000 professional robot figure currently in use today — this data figure was collected from 1998 to 2011 — the rate of robotic growth and use will increase by around 75% in just four years.

The predicted figures from the IFR strengthens the argument that robotics will be supporting and replacing manual workers rapidly in our near future. In an interview with my boss, Brian Burdette — Mechanical Engineer, Representative of the 10th Congressional District of Georgia State School Board, Conservative Republican Politician — he agrees that robotic technology is important to our growth, but that the technology will also continue to drive a gap through our social classes and displace manual labor. Mr. Burdette states that though robotic technology wouldn’t replace service industry jobs, such as shop drawing technicians and architects, he stated that it will displace our currently manual industry workers at an increasingly exponential rate.

Mr. Burdette and I discussed possible solutions to the rising issue, and in my interview, we came to an agreement that the governments shouldn’t be trying to fight robotic technology, but the governments should work with robotic technology and re-focus our children’s education to better suit the automated future. Bill McDermott — Co-CEO of the Multinational German Software Corporation SAP AG- released an article stating that we should be building a high-tech workforce. Mr. McDermott states that we have two trends that are detrimental to the United States currently: our shortage of workers with strong technological backgrounds and our shortage of 300,000 Math and Science teachers. To change our future, we must change our foundation from the ground up. To make the most impact in this robotic era, we must start focusing and motivating our children and college students to tackle STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers as stated by McDermott. Motivating students into STEM careers would create a strong addition to our currently overall workforce.

With my interview with Mr. Burdette, I’ve learned that Georgia will be implementing academic and technical career paths and courses for high schools in the next couple of years. Following school system models similar to Germany and Singapore, this will allow high school students in Georgia to choose more efficient paths that would benefit the economy and society as a whole. This is a big step forward in the right direction, as it will decrease the amount of students entering into dead-end jobs, and create a more well rounded, economically efficient high school graduates.

The major key in point to saving the workforce and economy from a very plausible recession throughout the next few decades would be to motivate and secure a strong, efficient education system. Our economy and workforce will be able to keep up with the robotic era, if and only if, our educational system re-tools itself to accommodate for technological growth.