Education is not an adequate defense against the rise of the robots & AI
Education is not an adequate defense against the rise of
the robots
By Martin Ford
Author, Keynote Speaker, Futurist, Software
Developer/Entrepreneur
Nov 28, 2015
The conventional wisdom has long been that the solution
to technology-driven job losses is invariably more education and vocational
training. As machines and smart software eat away at low-skill jobs, workers
are urged to retool themselves and continuously climb the skills ladder, taking
on roles that are beyond the reach of automation.
Economists refer to this propensity for technology to
erode the value of lower skill work, while at the same time boosting the
incomes of workers who are better equipped to participate in the information
economy, as “skill-biased technological change” or SBTC. Evidence for the
impact of SBTC can be found in the college wage premium. As of 2012, college
graduates had average incomes that were over 80 percent higher than workers
with only a high school diploma. Incomes for those with advanced degrees are
higher still.
Delving further into the numbers, however, uncovers a
discomfiting reality. That educational wage premium is being driven not by the
fact that college graduates are inundated with opportunity—but rather because
prospects for those with only high school educations are in collapse. A 2012
analysis by Citi Research found that incomes for young workers with bachelor’s
degrees declined by a full 15 percent between 2000 and 2010, and that decline
began well before the 2008 financial crisis. Any recent graduate can tell you
that we have entered the age of the degree-bearing barista: as many as half of
new college graduates end up taking jobs that don’t utilize their education.
This disturbing trend was analyzed formally by economists
Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand, who published a paper
entitled “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks” in
March 2013. Their analysis found that the need for skilled labor in the United
States peaked around 2000 and has since gone into decline. As a result, many
college graduates are taking lower-skill service jobs—often displacing those
without college degrees in the process.
It turns out that workers are not the only ones who can
climb the skills ladder: computer technology is proving remarkably adept at the
same feat. Indeed, it is a well known truth among those who work in robotics
and artificial intelligence that it is often much easier to automate the
information-based jobs held by white-collar workers than lower wage positions
that require physical manipulation. Building a robot that can come close to
replicating the visual perception, dexterity and hand-eye coordination of a
human being remains a staggering technical challenge. In contrast, smart
software already writes coherent news stories and reports, performs document
analysis for law firms, and, of course, trades on Wall Street. The Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently funding an $11 million
project at Rice University designed to automate many aspects of routine
computer programming.
The fact that high-skill jobs are disappearing leaves
aside a second, obvious problem: not everyone in our workforce is destined to
become a rocket scientist. Only a minority of the population has the
combination of cognitive capability and motivation necessary to excel in
technical fields. There is very likely a fundamental limit to the percentage of
our workforce that we can expect to graduate from college and then take on a
job that requires genuinely high levels of intellectual ability or creativity.
In other words, even if the jobs at the top of the skills ladder were there in
sufficient numbers, we would still ultimately have a serious problem finding a
role for a large fraction of our workforce.
The hard truth is that the traditional solution to
unemployment and poverty—and the solution that nearly all analysts and policy
makers continue to support—is not going to be sufficient in the robotic age.
Education has incalculable value both on a personal level, and as a public good
that benefits society as a whole. For those reasons, we should continue to
strongly support it and invest in it. We should not, however, expect ever more
schooling to assure workers a foothold in the future economy.
Martin Ford is the author of Rise of the Robots:
Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books), winner of the
Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2015. He is the
founder of a Silicon Valley–based software development firm and has over
twenty-five years of experience in computer design and software development. Follow
him on Twitter: @MFordFuture.
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