While policymakers tell the public that the Common Core standards will prepare all students for “college and careers,” while journalists like David Brooks assert that education will reduce poverty and inequality, economists predict that 47% of jobs will disappear in the U.S. due to robots and other new technology. Not all jobs will disappear: as one of the papers below says, there will still be a need for maids to make beds in hotels.
“At The WorldPost’s Future of Work Conference, a partnership of The Huffington Post and Berggruen Institute taking place in London this week, a similar anxiety has begun to emerge — if not with workers, then with the economists who study them.
“According to our research, 47 percent of jobs in the U.S. are at risk from technology over the next 20 years,” Michael Osborne, a co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, told me. The group’s research combined U.S. Bureau of Statistics data with a complex machine-learning algorithm of its own to draw its conclusions….”
“There are some recent trends experts are sharing which show how this new world might look like, when the small percentage of individuals or corporations that own machines (the means of production) are the only ones able to make money, and as the rest of us (the middle class) lose our jobs for the simple fact that #RobotsDoItBetter.
“Take the most-talked-about slide of the day (seen below), courtesy of Anthony McAfee, associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The line that has been going up since about 2002 represents total gross domestic product in the U.S. The line that is going down represents wages paid as a percentage of that GDP…”
“Open the link to see the graph. It shows a large increase in productivity coupled with a declining share of income going to wages.
Here is more about the conference in London:
Weekend Roundup: Preparing to Be Disrupted
By: Nathan Gardels, Editor-in-chief
This week, The WorldPost conference on “The Future of Work” took place at Lancaster House in London. Discussion around the theme “prepare to be disrupted” ranged from how the emergent sharing economy, along with 3D desktop manufacturing, would take work back into the home to worries that automation could eliminate as much as 47 percent of current jobs in the United States.
Participants included Google’s Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, economists Laura Tyson, Nouriel Roubini and Mohamed El-Erian, Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, Japanese robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi and Arianna Huffington among others. Jordan’s Queen Rania spoke about how social media is fostering small business startups in the Arab world and offering a different narrative than that of the fanatics. She also called for dropping the “I” from ISIS since “there’s nothing Islamic about them.”
In The WorldPost, Ian Goldin of the Oxford Martin School writes that technological advance can lead to greater inequality or inclusive prosperity depending on how we govern ourselves. In an interview, futurist Jeremy Rifkin outlines the zero-marginal cost economy he sees coming. XPrize founder Peter Diamandis discusses his new book “Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World” and how exponential technologies such as 3D manufacturing and synthetic biology are transforming all of our lives for the better. This week’s series from Singularity University looks at Germany’s advanced robotic metal sculpting machines. WorldPost Associate Editor Peter Mellgard reports that, “artificial intelligence is breaking out of the box,” according to a panel of experts who recently gathered in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Amy Rosen writes that the skill most needed in the future is an entrepreneurial mindset to navigate the ever-changing innovation economy. Virgin Unite’s Jean Oelwang writes that businesses of the future are looking beyond the bottom line and are becoming people and purpose oriented. Reflecting from Tokyo on a recent visit by Thomas Piketty, Yuriko Koike explains “why Japan does not have America’s super-rich problem.”
Speaking at the London conference, MIT’s Andrew McAfee argues that digital technology is “the best economic news in human history” but says that it poses many challenges to job creation in the future. David Gergen, the long-time presidential adviser now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, proposes that the best way to adapt to tech disruption is “from the bottom up” instead of waiting for government policy. Other topics reported on from the conference included: how jobs are at risk because of advancing technologies, why women are winners when it comes to successful petitions, how the myths around meditation and business have been busted and why, according to Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com, none of her peers in the House of Lords understands the Internet.
As the National People’s Congress got underway in China this week, legal scholar He Jiahong writes from Beijing that establishing the rule of law in China must challenge “guanxi,” or personal connections, in business and politics. WorldPost China Correspondent Matt Sheehan gives us an inside look at dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s exhibit on Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay. He also writes about an anti-pollution documentary that went viral in China.
Writing from Moscow, Georgy Bovt says Russia is headed down a “dark path” after the murder of Boris Nemtsov. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy says Nemtsov’s example will live long after his murder at the doorstep of the Kremlin. Writing from Athens, Kyriakos Mitskotakis looks at how European realities have deeply constrained the radical plans of the new Greek government.
In this week’s “Forgotten Fact,” The WorldPost looks at Russia’s investigation of opposition leaders and why it does not bode well for the Nemtsov case.
Mia Bloom discusses “how ISIS is using marriage as a trap” to lure young women from the West and elsewhere to join with its fighters in Syria and Iraq. WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports from Istanbul this week on the merciless humor of Middle East comics directed at ISIS. She also writes about NFL stars who have traveled to Turkey to teach women football. Writing from Berlin following Bibi’s visit to Washington, German parliamentarian Philipp Missfelderargues that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right about Iran and that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”
Finally, in light of the death of Turkey’s famed novelist Yasar Kemal, an ethnic Kurd, Behlül Özkan writes that, “in this time of great darkness in the Middle East, the Kurdish movement has reason to be hopeful about the future.”
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of the WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s editorial coverage. Eline Gordts is HuffPost’s Senior World Editor. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are Associate World Editors.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy) and Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review). Katherine Keating (One-On-One), Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are contributing editors.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from
MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo,Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
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The article is a load of neoliberal b.s.
Actually, if you ever saw “Artificial Intelligence” by Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick (it was the latter’s last film), robotics taking over the job market and creating huge income disparities is not impossible, but only good politics will keep it improbable.
This was a short story before it became a movie.
Unfortunately, human wisdom doesn’t keep up with the celerity of technological so called “advancement.”
The solution is easy to see — just give us that 20 hour work week that Techno-Prophets have been promising for the last hundred years …
So get and get your common core education and take this PARCC tests that will get your ready for your non-existent future career. Hey, we have already arrived at this future. I’ve posted many times how young college graduates, unless they are well-connected and wealthy, are working as baristas, bartenders, receptionists, $10/hour proofreaders, dog walkers, waiters. TFA cornered the market on those novice teaching jobs, even pushing out veteran teachers in the process. TFA = well connected.
In the future, there will be no need for everyone to work; the majority will be eating the equivalent of the Government Cheese, and living in Section 8 housing. I really believe this, and that is scary. I cannot imagine it will be a utopia, but we can hope. Feels like we’re living in the Matrix, right now.
What you are speaking about is known as Agenda 21 and is very real. Look it up you will be more than scared.
“economists predict that 47% of jobs will disappear in the US”
…which we should certainly believe because, as everyone knows, economists are rarely (if ever) wrong.
Wake me up when an economist makes a prediction that is actually believable: “the world will end tomorrow due to an alien invasion from planet Kroton”, for example.
Right because humans have never before adapted to technological changes and developed new and different jobs. Think of all those poor buggy whip makers. Thank heavens for the Amish.
We have already seen a decline in manufacturing due to global competition and automation. This is a main reason for the shrinking union membership. I believe this trend will continue as businesses look for more ways to shrink the bottom line.
In education, we must continue to fight for the rights of students to have a qualified teacher working with them. Teaching is more than plugging into Khan Academy, especially in the younger years where it is developmentally inappropriate to sit in front of a screen for hours. Krashen recently posed the question on the possibility that public schools like higher education may go the way of the independent contractor or adjunct. That would be a mistake! How do you plan a program in a school with a bunch of people that are just passing through?http://skrashen.blogspot.com/2015/02/will-public-school-teachers-become.html
I’ve heard some school administrators suggest using Rosetta Stone in school rather than hiring a teacher. Students who need remedial help are now using IReady software programs in schools instead of having a teacher help them. Students are now using software for “credit recovery” instead of actually doing work that the teacher assigned. Why do the work the teacher assigned? Students can just tick off some multiple choice answers in the software, play some games and surf the net in between and voila there’s the credit for class!
This happening. Replace the teacher with a technological fix. Educational technologists have the vision of ‘centers’ for learning and a learning coach that guides a student through all on line virtual learning…..what a mistake for society this will be.
Soylent Green Is People!!!
Indeed. But don’t eat the clowns; they taste funny.
Indeed, but the kids are tender, delicious and lucrative…
Michael Fiorillo and Donna:
TAGO!
For some reason, you made me think of how standardized tests label, sort and rank—used by Very [Self-]Important People to perform educational triage on the rest of us to deem who, using the ‘indisputable’ objectivity of numbers & stats, amounts to something and who doesn’t. In other words, who should get the goodies and who shouldn’t.
Let me go a step further. Eliminate the word “educational” from the phrase “educational triage” and consider what is happening a form of—
Figuring out, with ‘precision’ and ‘accuracy,’ how to THIN THE HERD.
THE HERD, of course, being us.
Soylent Green almost seems tame by comparison.
Pardon if I’m getting too negative here…
😎
P.S. But at least when you eat the clowns, they can tickle your funny bone.
Digesting Bill Gates & Co., on the other hand…
The solution to all those lost jobs is already being developed with financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Future of Birth Control: Remote Control Fertility
“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that it is backing a Massachusetts biotech company that is developing an implantable contraceptive that can be activated and deactivated by the user (or remotely by the corporation that manufactures/owns the technology for the device), the MIT Technology Review reports.”
http://time.com/2963130/the-future-of-birth-control-remote-control-fertility/
If it is easy for hackers to take over a car’s computers or break into the CIA, Pentagon, or NSA, then how easy would it be to control these devices remotely. Imagine a world where a woman/mother can’t qualify for food stamps or get a job without having one of these devices implanted in her body.
The world would be much better off if one of those was implanted in Bill Gates’ brain so every time he had an idea it was aborted.
LOL
I think it would be much better if we could go back in time and somehow abort Bill Gates before he was born. In fact, go back far enough to abort his father instead.
Ho horrible of you to say that Lloyd.
Loved it!!!!
Keep it going.
I agree.
very interesting, I had not heard of this
Who will be fixing, programing and creating all these robots?
I might have an answer for you: Back in the 1990s, I attended an all day workshop/lecture paid for by the school district where i worked, and we heard this story of a GM bumper factory that once employed 500 human workers in the 1950s, before it automated and ended up with TWO human workers who were highly trained and paid almost $100,000 annually to maintain the machines. The factory was still turning out the same number of bumpers annually—-no change there. But the two highly skilled workers were getting close to retirement age and GM was looking for two high school graduates with the necessary knowledge to train for that job. The job did not require a college degree.
Automation has been going on for several decades taking jobs away from flesh and blood humans. I’ve done some research on this issue and from what I’ve read, more jobs in the U.S. have been lost to automation than to cheap overseas labor markets like China, India and Mexico. In fact, many jobs that went from the U.S. to China are now returning to the U.S. because the cost of cheap labor is going up and it is cheaper to return and pay for the machines and a few human who will maintain them.
But what happens when there are machines to fix the machines, because industry is working on enveloping those machines too and there’s a new computer chip on the horizon that will enable this to happen? This particular chip is frightening when you spend any time thinking of the possible consequences because it might equal to or surpass a mortal human’s ability to reason and think and be programmed to do what its owners want of it. This new chip will replace the transistor and it is called the memristor.
‘Memristors, she points out, function in a way that is similar to a human brain: “Unlike a transistor, which is based on binary codes, a memristor can have multi-levels. You could have several states, let’s say zero, one half, one quarter, one third, and so on, and that gives us a very powerful new perspective on how our computers may develop in the future,” she told CNN’s Nick Glass.’
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/tech/mci-eth-memristor/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fedition_technology+%28RSS%3A+Technology%29
In terms of computation and AI, the popular term for this tipping point is the “Singularity.” Automation also requires advanced robotics. I think those are the three key areas: computing (i.e. computation power), artificial intelligence, and robotics.
And they are getting close, very close to that tipping point. I think that once that tipping point is reached, the oligarchs will consider the rest of us irrelevant and that the world would be better off without all of us cluttering it up.
I don’t know, it’s hard to say, because the exponential increases in traditional computing power (and decreases in price) will ultimately hit a wall and will require huge successes in quantum computing science, which is daunting stuff to say the least. Artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, and advanced robotics is too, so who knows what obstacles will arise or how big they’ll be. On the other hand, the exponential trends of technology advances have held up this far, and there are some good reasons to think it will continue. Voice recognition technology, as recent as ten or 15 years ago it was conventional wisdom that the previous predictions were science fiction fantasy, and that human speech was far more complex and difficult than previously thought. Today, I never cease being stunned at how accurate the dictation applications are on cell phones.
Did you read the CNN.com piece about the Memristor. From what I read, I think that is where the huge increase in quantum computing science will happen.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/tech/mci-eth-memristor/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fedition_technology+%28RSS%3A+Technology%29
Let’s think of food production and soil loss, air quality, and water resources. Our schools need to be preparing students for fields that are going to contribute to our species making our planet sustainable for us and for future generations. The role of technology is important in these fields, but equally important is knowing how to interact in real time with real people and with having a broad awareness of our natural world and our place in it.
Or we are on the road to doom.
I highly recommend “Who Owns the Future,” by Jaron Lanier. It’s very relevant to the issues & concerns raised in this thread. It questions the trajectory of economic value in the information age, and argues that there has been a fundamental misstep in how capitalism has gone digital and how it is contributing to income inequality. He also believes that it’s not to late to apply a course correction.
For a good overview of Who Owns the Future, check out this review by Janet Maslin if the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/books/who-owns-the-future-by-jaron-lanier.html?_r=0
Or, this one, by Laurence Scott, of the Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/27/who-owns-future-lanier-review
Robert Reich seems to think so – We’re Barreling Toward a Robot-Based Economy Where All Profits Go to the Robots’ Owners
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/were_barreling_towards_a_robot-based_economy_where_all_profits_20150203
This is probably inevitable, but the whole idea of “jobs” is a blip in human history. It is really only since the Industrial Revolution that we have decided that the only valid measure of wealth is money and so decided that the only way to survive is to acquire money.
It will be very disruptive to peoples’ lives while in the transition, but I hardly think that working all day to meet your own needs for food and shelter is worse than working all day to meet the needs of rich people, who give you a tiny sliver of the proceeds so you can meet your needs. Of course, we will have to learn to get along without a bunch of things we wouldn’t know we “needed” except they told us that we needed them on TV.
Maybe the oligarchs will allow us to move all the cities and homes underground freeing up land so all the unemployed people can farm a big enough plot to feed themselves since all the jobs will be automated—-but the oligarchs might be too ignorant, short sighted and stupid to have figured out that if most of the people have no job and no money, there will be few people to buy the junk their automated factories churn out.
Hmmm, most of us might even return to the old fashioned way of life where we eat together as famlies and talk with each other because no one can afford to by a cell phone, TV and pay for cable.
Yes, fewer of those “careers” and fewer of those “colleges” (at least good ones that won’t be privately run). Again, why do we need CCSS?
I think the reason the oligarchs—specifically Bill Gates, the Waltons and the Koch brothers—want their puppet reformers to push CCSS down our throats is so in time the people will be well trained to be obedient and not question what their masters do while they starve and suffer. The oligarchs don’t want critical thinkers and problems solvers among the people who might question what they are doing.
The small minority who do continue to question will be dealt with by military special forces and police swat teams and if the few who survive will spend the rest of their lives in private sector for profit prisons the obedient drones pay for, while the oligarchs’ propaganda through their corporate media will blame the prisoners for the high taxes that all flow to the oligarchs from workers earning poverty wages cleaning hotel rooms and mowing lawns.
In time, the programed hate among the brainwashed drones aimed at the critical thinkers and problem solvers who survived the special forces and swat teams and ended up in prisons for life will lead to quick execution laws for most crimes and that will cause prison costs to drop as the oligarchs weed out anyone from the gene pool that stands in their way until any humans who are left are like good, well trained obedient dogs—no better than pets who have been bred to smile while they suffer and starve.
Didn’t they call that Nazi Germany? ??
Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Russia under Putin, etc., but capitalist seem to like gangsters and Russia is no longer ruled by Communists.Socialists and capitalists hate them. In fact, didn’t American capitalists like Hitler too, at first?
Yes they did
“Having now analyzed the postwar historical trajectory of occupational employment changes we can now characterize ways in which technology has affected the labor market (shaping the occupational employment structure) and ways it has not affected the labor market (causing wage inequality). Some analysts have mistakenly asserted that if an analysis suggests that technological change has not greatly affected wage inequality that this is equivalent to saying that technology has had no impact on the labor market. We have just documented a longstanding trend of occupational upgrading—more white-collar and less blue- and pink-collar work—for many decades. These changes in the occupational structure are primarily technology-driven and have increased the skills and education employers seek in the labor market which, in turn, necessitates an educational upgrading of the workforce. This is what Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz refer to as the “race between technology and skills.” We believe there has been such a race, that technology has had a major effect, but also that the education and skills have greatly improved and satisfied that increased demand.
There has also been an increase in so-called “skill premiums,” such as the college wage premium. We view that increase as reflecting other factors such as deregulation of industries, globalization, an eroded minimum wage, excessive unemployment, and declining unionization rather than the product of technology-driven skill shortages. That is, in the race between skills and technology since 1979 there has been roughly a tie. This has especially been the case since 1995, after which the college premium has barely grown. Moreover, as shown in Mishel et al. (2012), over the last 10 years, real
wages have been flat or falling for a majority of college graduates, including those in nearly every occupational group (e.g., business occupations). In these circumstances, where technology and skills have run neck and neck, technology has had a large impact on the labor market but it has not generated wage inequality. We have faced a “wage deficit” rather than a “skills deficit,” meaning that jobs at every education and skill level have not seen appropriate wage growth. This is evident in the failure of wages of both high school– and college-educated workers to keep pace with productivity, and in the extraordinary share of profits in the economy, especially in the 2000s.”
Click to access technology-inequality-dont-blame-the-robots.pdf
As always, our public policy decisions will ultimately dictate the future trajectory of economic growth and wealth distribution. Robots may gradually replace human laborers, and sharply reduce the pool of available jobs. However, there is an (potential) upside to this process as GDP will soar due to significant gains in productivity. Shared prosperity is a real possibility in this world, but will be contingent on implementing the proper economic policies in response to changing conditions (e.g., work sharing, patent/IP reform, a basic income guarantee, government employment programs, equitable taxation, etc.). I think we can all agree that more time for leisure is not necessarily a problem. That being said, a nightmare scenario where the wealthy few dominate over the unemployed masses is not outside the realm of possibility either. Thus, it’s essential that we begin building the requsite political will to restructure markets in a favorable direction.
If 97% of the world’s best scientists are correct,
in 20 years it will not be only jobs that disappear
AND
what disappears then or some time afterwards will be even much worse than the loss of jobs. TIME will tell but I am betting on the scientists who have studied this phenomenon for the lion’s share of their adult life.
Too many politicians disregard the scientists findings just like they disregard what the professional teachers are saying.
But wait, isn’t 47% the same percentage that got Mitt Romney in so much hot water? Hmmm. Better not post what I’m thinking. Diane has proscribed conspiracy theories.
Artificial Intel is derived from common core. Opting out of testing and computer based learning, if the latter is even possible now, are realities a new POTUS must realize.
It looks like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and teams of lawyers are working to address synthetic biology.
More of the same from the same people who profit.
https://livetalksla.org/events/nathan-gardels-and-nicolas-berggruen/?fbclid=IwAR1x1fQjzFKnbxV2bhoyEZkFNYLrzNS2IYvrICJ6CSysvAxJi6p5VQhdmVI