STEM Disruption

21 min readJul 28, 2015

Get a STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degree is a common response to people when the topic of automation of jobs comes up or as a solution to increasing automation because more automation and robots means more jobs maintaining the robots and software. This article illustrates that this solution is not so simple and shows how even STEM jobs are not immune from disruption in the near future due to new technologies.

STEM Opportunities

There have been various reports discussing the potential of potential job disruption within the next 20 years, a study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne found nearly half of U.S. jobs could be susceptible to computerization over the next two decades. An analysis from the Committee of Economic Development of Australia warns almost 40% of jobs, could disappear in the next 10 to 15 years because of technological advancements. Both these studies found that low skilled jobs are most at risk. Deloitte, the Big Four accountancy firm, and the University of Oxford found that 35% of existing UK jobs at high risk of replacement in the next twenty years, and that lower-paid jobs over five times more likely to be replaced than higher-paid.

There are also many studies showing a erosion of the middle class and polarization of high skilled and low skilled jobs taking place. A study at MIT by David Autor and David Dorn found that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks.

Bill Gates — “Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses, it’s progressing. 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.”

Some economists may still be thinking everything will be fine in the future because low skilled workers who find their jobs disrupted will train and upgrade their skill set to work in higher skilled jobs such as occupations in STEM. They say more automation usage will create more jobs requiring talented scientists and engineers to program, design, and maintain the robots and software. Suppose we encouraged all the retail, food prep, transport, clerical workers, trade workers and so on who face disruption, to climb the skills ladder into retraining to gain higher skills in STEM;

Not every person has the ability to learn these difficult skills — almost half of US bachelor’s degree students who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009. In engineering, of every one hundred who start, only fifty-five make it to a degree. The subject with the highest dropout rate in the UK is Computer science. In 2011 retail workers had a median age of 38, think about them or the 50 year old unemployed truck/taxi driver or the 26% of fast food workers with children training to become robotic engineers or computer vision experts. Gaining an entirely new skill set isn't easy and is currently very expensive and time consuming.
Not every person has the desire or equal opportunities to study STEM subjects — the current trend is that women don't want to study STEM subjects, only about a quarter of workers in STEM fields were women in 2011. Just 18% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degree recipients were women in 2013. African-American and Latino workers also now represent 29 percent of the general workforce population, but just 16 percent of the advanced manufacturing workforce, 15 percent of the computing workforce and 12 percent of the engineering workforce.
There are currently not enough STEM jobs for STEM graduates, the shortage of stem workers is a complete myth. A 2014 study by the National Science Board found that of 19.5 million holders of degrees in STEM, only 5.4 million were working in those fields The Center for Economic Policy and Research, tracing graduates from 2010 through 2014, discovered that 28 percent of engineers and 38 percent of computer scientists were either unemployed or holding jobs that did not need their training.

Extract from the Atlantic article, The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage. “A compelling body of research is now available from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations, no one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelor’s degrees or higher. All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings — the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more. Unemployment among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious “shortages” such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent).”

Extract from IEEE article, The STEM Crisis Is a Myth. “Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.”

“If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies, You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers. None of those things are observable, in fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.” — Ron Hira

STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality about computing occupations — Two points made by Lowell and Salzman are particularly relevant. They find that there is a sufficient supply of students well-prepared to enter the fields of science and engineering, arguing that “the available evidence indicates an ample supply of students whose preparation and performance has been increasing over the past decades”. They add that there is also an adequate supply of experienced STEM workers, writing, “Purported labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anecdotal and also not supported by the available evidence”
It is noteworthy that although Microsoft laments its 6,000 unfilled job openings, it laid off at least 5,000 employees during the recession. How many of these job openings are replacing employees who were laid off? And how many other technology companies face a similar situation?
Despite all of the layoffs, last year employers were granted almost 130,000 H-1B visas, allowing them to hire college-educated workers from abroad, 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign graduates of U.S. universities. All of these H-1B workers are available to employers to fill what they claim to be labor shortages in STEM fields. It is important to note that 130,000 is not an insignificant number of workers in terms of the total STEM workforce.
In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, between 2010 and 2011, the employment level of the entire U.S. STEM workforce (including workers at all education levels) grew by only 92,492 jobs. In addition to the H-1Bs, employers are also able to hire new foreign graduates with STEM degrees from U.S. universities for 29 months through the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, a program that has no set limit, or “cap,” and no minimum or prevailing wage requirements to protect foreign and American workers from wage suppression and depression.
When the economy is operating near full employment, it might be sensible to adjust public policies to help employers secure additional workers to keep the economy growing at full speed, but even then it might be preferable to first allow wages to rise, sending a market signal to U.S. students to enter the STEM fields. Unfortunately, there are no indicators that this pace of growth will occur anytime soon. Until then, the nation would be better served if Microsoft filled its 3,400 job openings for “researchers, developers and engineers” by hiring and retraining some of the 141,000 unemployed workers in computer occupations who are actively looking for work around the country.

The BLS projects that in the decade ending in 2022, the number of engineering jobs will have increased only by 8.6 percent, which falls short of the 10.6 percent rise expected for the workforce as a whole. Most striking are forecasts for the chemical, mechanical, and electrical specialties, long mainstays of the profession. Together, the three are estimated to grow by only 4.3 percent, well under half the expected growth in the workforce.

Even if education was somehow overhauled there simply isn’t enough jobs available in STEM for every low skilled worker displaced to transition into. It only makes up about 5.5% of the U.S. workforce. STEM vacancies will not be able to grow quickly enough. The transitions for the workforce from agriculture, to manufacturing, from manufacturing to service sectors took many decades. The world can’t go to STEM as a major sector in 20 years.

Vivek Wadhwa - How are policy makers going to grapple with entire industries’ disruptions in periods that are shorter than election cycles? The industrial age lasted a century, and its consequent changes have happened over generations. Now we have startups in Silicon Valley shaking up bedrock industries such as cable and broadcasting, hotels, and transportation. The writing is clearly on the wall about what lies ahead.
Yet even the most brilliant economists — and futurists — don’t know what to do about it. We won’t be able to retrain the majority of the workforce fast enough to take the new jobs in emerging industries. During the industrial revolution, it was the younger generations who were trained — not the older workers. Regardless, at best we have another 10 to 15 years in which there is a role for humans. The only certainty is that much change lies ahead that no one really knows how to prepare for.

Global Competition for STEM Jobs

Even if the US somehow managed to create a large STEM sector it will face increasing global competition, just like the manufacturing sector, soon STEM occupations will increasingly suffer from outsourcing. In fact more than 370,000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Electrical and electronic engineering has been heavily outsourced abroad, US employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down from about 385,000 in 2002.

The same could happen to programming jobs, I think it would be arrogant to say it’s never possible because US programmers are “superior” and other countries are are full of “low quality devs” which is what any debate into outsourcing software jobs turns into presently. What is evident is the suggested “superiority” will not be around for much longer, many countries have caught up and doing better educating their population. US high schoolers are dramatically trailing behind comparable countries — especially in Math.

On numeracy, U.S. millennials are in a statistical dead heat with Spain and Italy for last place, showing an average score of 255 while the average for participating countries is 275 on a 500-point scale. Young American workers today are more educated than ever before, but the nation’s largest generation is losing its edge against the least and most educated of other countries, according to a provocative new report. One half of U.S. millennials scored below the threshold that indicates proficiency in literacy. By comparison, Finland and Japan had between 19 percent and 23 percent of their millennials miss the threshold for proficiency in literacy. The analysis found that more than half of U.S. millennials lack proficiency when it comes to applying reading and math skills at the workplace.

“There is a global race for STEM skills and other countries are heavily investing and increasing the supply of STEM students, 41% of all degrees awarded by Chinese institutions in 2011 were in a STEM subject, almost twice the proportion of STEM degrees awarded in the UK and three times the rate in the US. China now stands behind only the United States in the number of science and technology journals published annually, and is expected to overtake the US in scientific output within few years, according to a recent study by the Royal Society.

By 2020, China expects to have nearly 195 million community college and university graduates — compared with no more than 120 million in the United States. Accenture predicts that Brazil will increase its engineering graduates by 68% by 2015 and will produce more PhD engineers than the US by 2016.”

“China has struggled to create enough white-collar jobs for its soaring population of college graduates. In mid-2013, the Chinese government revealed that only about half of the country’s current crop of college graduates had been able to find jobs, while more than 20 percent of the previous year’s graduates remained unemployed. According to one analysis, fully 43 percent of Chinese workers already consider themselves to be overeducated for their current positions.” -Martin Ford

A relatively highly educated workforce has been a traditional source of advantage, however, the rapid rise in global education means this historic strength is being eroded, the increasing numbers of highly educated people in the world will inevitably increase the international competition for the goods and services they produce.

Improved Remote Collaboration Technologies

Salaries for computer science in the US are high, the average starting salary for a computer graduate in the US is $66,800 compared to $33,807 in the UK. What happens when a US company can easily hire 2 UK or 5 Chinese equally skilled developers for the price of a US one? An amusing story is the US software developer who outsourced his job to China and spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube. He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.

Some people can already work without being face to face remotely from home thanks to improvements in communication. Between 2001 and 2010 in the UK the proportion of people working mainly from home rose by 21%, to cover 12.9% of the workforce. Hyper connective technology is creating an on demand workforce where companies or people can get global access to independent free agent expertise for a year, month or project. Websites and online talent-sourcing platforms are proliferating. In some cases, registered workers bid for simple work, such as a few hours of writing merchandising copy for websites. Other platforms offer the services of high-skill professionals or entire teams for projects such as software development.

Digital disruption will continue redefining what goods and services need to be produced locally and what can be outsourced to other countries, digital disruption is levelling the playing field in which professionals operate. When a company in the US can easily tap into labour pools in India, China, Brazil and so on, it will increase competition and surplus of people willing to do STEM jobs and lower scarcity of workers with those skills. The FT reports more and more people work for virtual platforms instead of companies; work is auctioned to pools of remote contractors.

Thomas Friedman on the Globalization of Higher Education — “In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.”

Communication will become crystal clear and responsive, 5G networks are predicted to arrive in the US in 2020, it will be about 66 times faster than 4G. Download speeds should increase from today’s 4G peak of 150 megabits per second to at least 10 gigabits per second. That’s fast enough to download “Guardians of the Galaxy” in 4 seconds. 5G would allow the ability to stream two 4K connections at the same time. It will shorten the lag time before the first bits show up 4G ideally needs 15 to 25 milliseconds, that delay will drop to 1 millisecond with 5G. 4G arrived in 2010, if 5G arrives by 2020 then how far away is 6G?

The global diffusion of job opportunities will be aided by the rise of improved global networks. More and more of the developing world will achieve reliable fast internet within the next 20 years allowing environment’s for immersive solutions that allow realistic telepresence to deliver high definition video and audio. A future example for software development could be that the design and client specifications is done local but the implementation is done by a remote team in China and testing by a team in India.

In 2030 the global labour market will be highly competitive with virtualisation of the workforce, literally. Most companies still need people to come into the office, this could reduce in the future, soon staff may be able to work as efficiently and collaboratively as they could if they were physically in the office. This video of real time graphics rendering combined with a virtual reality headset makes it very likely that virtual immersive environments will be possible in the future.

3D scanning tech which companies are working on such as Google’s Project Tango and Faceshift which live captures facial expressions to computer generated characters, will make it possible to add your 3D self into this realistic virtual world and be able to interact and communicate with others and have it feel truly immersive.

It’s likely facebook will add their expertise on the social side too with Oculus, making conversations and interactions feel natural. Analysts at Piper Jaffray recently said it expects virtual reality to be the megatrend of the next 30 years, with Oculus leading the charge. They compared the market to the mobile phone industry of 15 years ago.

“The future of this technology(VR) is going to be “pretty wild, our mission is to give people the power to experience anything, even if you don’t have the ability to travel somewhere, or to be with someone in person, or even if something is physically impossible to build in our analog world,” — Mark Zuckerberg

In the future when you have ubiquitous and even more advanced next generation oculus headsets that FB bought for $2bn, Microsoft’s Hololens or whatever the secretive Magic Leap AR company Google invested $500million into, you know with that much technical expertise and money invested it’s not just gaming that they want to change, it’s real life.

Combining improved VR/AR hardware with exponentially increased graphics rendering, 5g internet allowing 4K video then collaborative work in the virtual world will be staggeringly immersive. In the future going to work could be as simple as putting on the headset. The technology may reach a point where companies may prefer the virtual over the physical.

It could offer advantages in efficiency and price. Need to walk to someone’s desk for a face to face talk, or arrange a meeting with a client or staff members? You can transport instantly to them. You would just need a powerful server and fast internet compared with a physical office building where you need parking space, rent costs, maintenance, repairs, heating, electricity, cleaners, toilet, food/kitchen facilities and equipment. If you want to expand a physical office, you need to move everything and will cost more in rent or to buy. With a virtual office its as simple as building a house extension as in The Sims.

VR has the potential to be more powerful for a business than an office could ever be, even thinking of replicating the “office” model could be completely undervaluing the potential of virtual world technology where any work environment is possible, there are no limits. What country is a virtual office located in? This could increase incentive for companies to say the office is located in low taxing countries or not even in any country but in the “cloud”, this may cause problems for governments in collecting tax.

Many people current office roles could be susceptible to this technology, Employers using VR can overcome remote communication disadvantages meaning they no longer have physical inefficiencies or geographical location limitations and could recruit from anywhere in the world with no H-1B Visa’s or migration hurdles to go through. This could substantially disrupt people living in cities/countries with higher living cost because workers in cheaper living areas(which are now producing many STEM graduates) could undercut them. Especially if tools like Skype instant translation is combined with mouth/audio syncing in the virtual world, then you could communicate with people speaking different languages.

The 4 above videos show that immersive communication, in any language, with a remote virtual workforce, possible in the near future, the only other barriers to businesses are culture, timezone and the difficulty of the manager orchestrating many remote people, the latter which could be facilitated by an advanced form of AI one day.

Changing Models Of Employment

Over the next decade more and more people will be collaboratively and flexibly working in the cloud without any fixed location a study by Intuit found by 2020 enhanced collaboration and video services will transform the new workplace as distributed, virtual teams meet regularly using these new technologies. The globalization of talent will continue. Information and communications technologies will better enable globally distributed work.

A report by the Economist found as technology develops, however, it seems increasingly likely that the 20th-century construct of people trooping across a city to sit next to each other simply to do their job will come increasingly under question, as more flexible approaches emerge. As such, eight in ten executives agree that the working environment will become “virtual” thanks to more secure mobile technologies and cloud computing. The workforce will become decentralised and full of freelance contractors, employees will accessible to companies in any location in a hyper connected world.

In 2013, 67 per cent of employees worldwide were working in more actively collaborative ways, while 57 per cent reported an increase in their number of coworkers who work from different geographical locations. Jobs and organisations are becoming increasingly flexible in response to the shift towards a 24 hour society. 50 per cent of businesses say that flexible working (including flexible hours and offsite working) is now standard practice.

“Forget about “outsourcing.” In today’s hyperconnected world, there is no “in” and no “out.” There’s only “good, better and best,” and if you don’t assemble the best team you can from everywhere, your competitor will.” — Thomas Friedman

Technology is disrupting the very nature of employment. Just like how Uber has turned taxi employees into independent contractors and refuses to treat them as “employees” so it doesn’t have to pay minimum wage, Obamacare health insurance, unemployment insurance, no guarantee of stability, worker’s compensation or pensions, this kind of employment could infect many other occupations, possibly even STEM occupations in the future.

A 2013 report estimates that roughly a third of the US workforce, more than 40 million, consists of temps, part-timers, contractors, contingent workers, freelancers/independent workers and those who are under-employed or work without employer-sponsored health insurance, 401Ks or FLEX accounts” according to a report by the Harvard Business Review. By 2020, 40 percent of the US workforce will consist of freelancers according to a study by Intuit.

A study by Deloitte found Canadian organizations are reaching out to the “open talent economy.” 47% of Canadian respondents plan to increase their use of contingent, outsourced, contract or part-time workers in the next three to five years. 80% view workforce capability as an important trend — and 53% see it as a long-term priority for their organization.”
“Traditional employment will no longer be the norm. replaced by contingent workers such as freelancers and part-time workers. The long-term trend of hiring contingent workers will continue to accelerate with more than 80% percent of large corporations planning to substantially increase their use of a flexible workforce.”

The credo of the politician today is: “Why are you not hiring more people here?” The credo of the C.E.O. today is: “You only hire someone — anywhere — if you absolutely have to,” if a smarter machine, robot or computer program is not available. Yes, this is a simplification, but the trend is accurate. The trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over. Thanks to the merger of, and advances in, globalization and the information technology revolution, every boss now has cheaper, easier access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. So just doing a job in an average way will not return an average lifestyle any longer. — Thomas L. Friedman

Automate Automation

Even more disruption is possible for high-tech jobs like software developer roles. Automation tools such as website design companies like Squarespace which allow non developers to make websites eliminating the need for many web developers, can create superstars which crowd out competitors. The world is increasingly moving towards ‘winner takes all’, superstar economic outcomes where those that create something unique or special command increased returns on their efforts while the rest get lower and lower returns.

Microsoft Research’s Machine Teaching project is creating tools that would allow anyone to teach a computer how to do machine learning tasks, even if that person has no expertise in data analysis or computer science. Eventually, Simard hopes that a subject matter expert –such as a doctor, an information worker or a chef — could use these machine teaching tools to train models capable of doing tasks on their behalf.

A computer program has been developed that fixes old code faster than expert engineers, similar tools could one day arrive for programming which could eventually move it to a higher layer of abstraction and be combined with advanced voice recognition and natural language processing tools. DARPA has an upcoming Cyber Grand Challenge which again is testing people versus machines, the challenge is to develop automatic software to protect a computer from an attack with malware. If it is achieved some cyber security occupations could face disruption.

DARPA have also funded an $11m project for the next four years with more than a dozen Rice University researchers working on the PLINY Project. PLINY aims to automatically detect program defects, suggest program repairs, and complete program drafts based on code and specifications mined from vast repositories of existing code.
“If successful, PLINY has the potential to be a transformative technology,” said David Melski, VP of Research at GrammaTech. “It has the potential to change the way programming is done, the way programming is taught, and who does programming. It could give the power to express computation to people who don’t currently have it.”

Code has been automatically “transplanted” from one piece of software to another for the first time, with researchers claiming the breakthrough could radically change how computer programs are created. It successfully transplanted a video coding format from one media player to another. It took the automated system 26 hours to complete the transplant, while manual addition of the code happened over a period of 20 days.

The system could be used to transplant anything from automatic save features to social media integration, video chat, spellcheckers and even video and audio processing. At present it only works on the C programming language, but there is nothing to stop it being applied to others. Eventually it may even be possible to transplant features between languages and platforms with no human involvement whatsoever.

Conclusion

The reason this STEM section is quite long is because I see many STEM people naively yet arrogantly dismiss the potential for them to be disrupted and claim they were smart for picking a “safe” career and people which didn't it's their own fault and victim blaming others saying they should have got a STEM degree. Yet as outlined this is clearly not the case as some high skilled, STEM including even the people who program the machines are vulnerable to disruption.

For the “smart” people who may pick a career they think is safe from being automated or outsourced or disrupted, I wonder about your empathy to your parents, siblings, relatives, friends, spouse, children etc? Just because you think your situation is going to be OK for you doesn’t mean you can be oblivious to everyone else who could struggle.

Even if you do manage to pick a career that appears safe from direct disruption doesn't necessarily mean that it’s immune from disruption by external forces. The market system is dependent on customers, and if large numbers of consumers (perhaps even a majority) are without any means to purchase goods and services, the market economy cannot succeed. Your taxes may go up as a consequence, public services be reduced and in the worst case scenario it could cause another recession.

The mantra “My jobs safe, I don't care about anyone else” else is unbelievably short-sighted. Even Billionaire CEO’s are worrying about this. Technology will disrupt almost all sectors of the economy, it not only threatens lower skilled jobs but also has the potential to replace higher skilled jobs and open those jobs to more global competition, no business is safe from the effects of the coming disruption.

In the full article on exponential disruption I show how more industries and major sectors face disruption within the next 20 years from smarter, cheaper and more powerful digital and robotic technologies, increasing educated global competition, new outsourcing technology and changing models of employment. I also explain the solutions to ease the disruption and prevent unnecessary suffering as we enter a new digital age driven by exponential technologies. There is a way for us to equally enjoy all the wealth and prosperity this technologies offer.

http://nathanleigh.co.uk/exponentialdisruption.html