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Today's 6th graders will hit their prime working years in 2030.
By that time, the "robot apocalypse" could be fully upon us. Automation and artificial intelligence could have eliminated half the jobs in the United States economy.
Or, plenty of jobs could still exist, but today's students could be locked in a fierce competition for a few richly rewarded positions requiring advanced technical and interpersonal skills. Robots and algorithms would take care of what used to be solid working- and middle-class jobs. And the kids who didn't get that cutting-edge computer science course or life-changing middle school project? They'd be relegated to a series of dead-end positions, serving the elites who did.
Alternatively, maybe Bill Gates and Elon Musk and the other big names ringing the alarm are wrong. A decade from now, perhaps companies will still complain they can't find employees who can read an instruction manual and pass a drug test. Maybe workers will still be able to hold on to the American Dream, so long as they can adjust to incremental technological shifts in the workplace.
Which vision will prove correct?
30 years into the Information Revolution and schools are only just now realizing they should teach kids how to code...
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday December 15 2017, @03:02PM
Yes, health care is an activity that will continue to need doing, but who is going to pay for it? and with what exchange medium, because what are THEY getting paid for? And similarly how are the tools and consumables (sutures, bandages, medicine) to be paid for, if most people aren't working? The situation is normally seen in terms of locality: a tourist destination depends on outside money coming in to pay for lodging and services; a commodity location depends on outside money coming in for food or harvested/dug natural material going out. But if other people don't have money either, how is ANY of the system supposed to work? The "Star Trek" ideal of not needing money, or even to make money, because energy is so cheap and matter replication is so cheap that everyone can have everything, is not the same as capitalists borrowing money at interest to buy production robots (meaning any kind of machinery, not humanoid robots!), which replace "lots of people getting paid" with "bankers getting paid so that robot manufacturer gets paid" - a net narrowing of the scope of money circulation. The logical problem, that there's no reason for the production robots to produce as much because not as many people can pay for the products, doesn't happen until well after lots of people have been laid off and lots of money is owed to the banks for having replaced the people with robots. The cycle of money flowing is as necessary as water flowing back into rain; money doesn't help anybody sitting in a mattress, any more than electricity in a battery, it's all about money MOVING.