Maid or Millionaire?
The Economic Over & Under of Technological Progress
All parents say they want what is best for their children. They make incredible sacrifices to afford better educational opportunities, the ability to travel, and all sorts of other things that would have been considered unbelievable luxuries for a person of any age, much less a young person, fifty years ago. But of all the “better” things parents want for their children, it’s eventual economic opportunity in life. Better job, better career, easier life raising the grandchildren.
The advent of automation has always taken people out of artisan tasks. It is easier for a machine to make a chair than for a person to do it. Most automotive factories in Japan are now almost completely automated. The creep of tasks performed by machines and computers has accelerated at an accelerating rate, thanks to Moore’s Law, which as yet doesn’t seem to be slowing much, and with quantum computing on the horizon, the game may change even faster.
“Good,” says the average parent. “It means my child won’t have to work on an assembly line and can be in an office instead.”
The trouble, as it turns out, is that it’s not just assembly line jobs that are being automated. Indeed, it is almost all of the non-creative processing jobs that fill the Western service economy.
Mortgage document analysis? Loan officer? Their days are numbered.
Accountants, lawyers, even doctors are all facing the onslaught of the machines too. With the average cost of an undergraduate education exceeding $100,000 and advanced degrees doubling or tripling that (or more, in the case of certain medical specialties), it is becoming an ever riskier proposition to invest up-front in a lengthy educational commitment (This doesn’t mean education should be abandoned, but we have to figure out a way to break it down into smaller bites).
Doctors aren’t going to disappear—but we won’t need very many of them. The same goes for lawyers, accountants, traders, bankers, and all of the other information processing jobs of the Western middle class. Driving, a profession that employs millions worldwide, is also on the verge of being obsoleted.
As the gains and losses from progress are unevenly distributed, there are certain kinds of jobs that will be greatly shielded from automation. It’s difficult to automate a maid or a nurse who changes bed pans. Plumbers and electricians are not so easy to displace. Carpenters and other builders are likely to be fighting 3D Printing bots to keep their jobs, though.
Indeed, it seems that the Jetsons had it all wrong.
If you are the parents of bright young people who are in the midst of planning their futures, you have to think more critically about the future in which they will be living. All of the assumptions that your adult lives have been built on are rapidly deteriorating. With a traditional approach to education, your son may be a biology whiz hoping to be a doctor, but may end up being a gardener instead. Your daughter may be the state mock trial champion, but that doesn’t mean a profitable career as a lawyer awaits.
Even computer programming is becoming increasingly automated, and the useful, human-only tasks the province of the Neck Beards. So don’t count on new technical skills for salvation, either.
Unfortunately what it means is you can’t take anything for granted, and there is no panacea. It means your son or daughter is likely to have to change career paths numerous times just to survive. It means the idea of a “career” itself is on the way out.
Moreover, just because it’s clear which industries and professions are being disrupted today by automation, robotics, and other machine replacement, doesn’t mean some other fields are necessarily safe. We’re only one breakthrough here or there away from new jobs being added to the endangered list.
Even employers are recognizing this, and are increasingly looking to hire humble, teachable employees rather than well-educated, highly skilled employees. Academic pedigree doesn’t count for much these days, outside of academia itself. Indeed, employers are frantically trying to find people with “soft skills,” like the ability to communicate, empathy, working as part of a team, and problem-solving. Skills that can’t be taught, but rather only learned through experience.
The collective sum of soft skills are what “entrepreneurship” really means. Entrepreneurship doesn’t mean a tech start-up with a venture capital investment.
Entrepreneurship means looking at the nuances of life, and creating value in the midst of uncertainty.
It doesn’t matter if a person is brilliant or average. Traditional views of intelligence are equally becoming irrelevant. Youngsters need to be toughened up to the vicissitudes of life’s new normal and ready to feel their way through. The sooner your child begins practicing this skill, the better off they will be.
The experiences we are building at Exosphere are precisely this sort of non-Disneyland opportunities for people of any age to be forced into doing things that make them uncomfortable, and creating something new where there was nothing before. There are lots of other opportunities too, and young folks need to choose one that’s right for their particular circumstances.
Life in the 21st century is interesting, exciting, and also perilous. Young people who aren’t prepared to navigate these waters are going to be ship-wrecked and lost. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. They just need better direction. If you are a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, teacher, or mentor to young people, you need to start sharing the new reality with them.
If you don’t, perhaps nobody else will.
