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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: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Friday December 15 2017, @06:43PM (2 children)
My expectation (and fear) is that they'll try to keep it alive through charity.
"We own the robots, so we get anything you want, and you get whatever scraps we so generously decide to give you!"
Likely tied to religious institutions or some other ideology factory, so they can make people jump through hoops and compete to be the most "deserving", thereby maintaining their divide and conquer strategy. That way they get to go around talking about how noble they are for helping the less fortunate, while simultaneously enslaving all of humanity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @08:59PM (1 child)
People do work for more than money, and that is a part that Marx did get right when he talked about "alienation," ie. that workers in a capitalist system become divorced from the meaning in the objects they are producing, whereas making those things as artisans were previously meaningful works, expressions of their spirit and genius. As such the objects they make become meaningless and so too they become meaningless.
Take that in a case where robots are making everything and everybody lives and dies on the charity of the masters. The deep spiritual hunger for meaning Man has will still be unfed and lead to them overthrowing that system (per Marx).
"Man does not live by bread alone" sort of thing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday December 18 2017, @02:25PM
That's part of what makes private charity as a stopgap measure so dangerous though. Firstly because it can demand work of some form as a kind of payment -- there's a pretty strong religious idea in the US at least that work is "good for the soul", so you might get something where the church gives you work in exchange for food -- sure the work could be done by robots, but inefficiency doesn't matter much when you're trading work for someone else's donations. It could even be intentionally inefficient -- some homeless advocacy group decides they won't use robot labor because robots are what's putting people out of a job, so they end up creating jobs looking after people who don't have jobs. Doesn't even have to be so well organized -- there's a lot of groups lately pushing for food gardens instead of lawns, so you could end up with wealthy robot owners setting up community gardens where the poor can work to feed each other.
Then the people who do work end up both distracted and feeling morally superior to anyone who can't or doesn't, and they'll get some small salary from some wealthy donor supported non-profit which means you could end up with people fighting over those few jobs rather than joining to topple the ownership class...along with support jobs building/repairing the robots, and maybe some jobs in entertainment and such...