The coming employment crisis

One of President Trump’s campaign promises that cannot be met; that will be, in fact, impossible to meet, is his promise to put 25 million people back to work. In the coming 10 years, millions of people will no longer be needed to work in a large variety of jobs across the country and 40 percent of the current Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist. The reason for this is robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

These are not things that show promise of being created in the near future; these are things that are with us now and are becoming exponentially more adept at doing jobs and completing tasks that are done by humans today. These jobs will be both blue collar and white collar and will spread across the entire employment field. It’s difficult to imagine a job that WON’T be affected by these two inventions in the years to come.

Some of the experts contend that just as many jobs will be created due to these new inventions as will be lost but it’s hard to imagine that happening. There are many jobs that are so routine that an employee essentially performs the same tasks day after day for as long as they work. These are the kinds of jobs that are most likely to be taken over by robots and the companies that employ them will save large sums of money because they’re exchanging high labor costs (human doing jobs) for low-cost power (robots doing the same jobs). In addition, robots never get sick, never stay home with a child, and never take a vacation. When robots malfunction, as they typically will, the fix is usually simple and cheap.

But even jobs requiring higher levels of thinking will be affected; in particular teachers. A robot can be programmed with all the information currently known about a subject and the robot will be able to recall it immediately. The robot can be programmed with only facts or both facts AND theories and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to tell the difference. So educating our students will no longer be done by humans with biases, it will be done will robots with no biases who only present what they’ve been hired to present.

So what are the consequences of this new technological revolution? The downside is certainly steep. It could cause the highest unemployment rates we’ve ever seen in this country with millions of people becoming hungry and homeless which leads to social confusion and unrest. But that will only happen if we don’t start preparing for it now. Now, a downside to preparing for it now is that has never been a strong suit of human beings. We tend to wait until the worse happens which is comforting to the lead-up of it happening because we convince ourselves that maybe it WON’T happen. But when does, we’re rarely prepared for it.

It’s important to remember that robotics and AI are not major players in a great science fiction movie. They are as real as the nose on your face, they are here now and they will do nothing but multiply and become much better at what they do in the years to come. So the way we combat them taking our jobs is to learn new skills and new jobs that will endure the massive employment changes on the horizon. Make no doubt about it! Companies and corporations, for the most part, are concerned only with their bottom line and if they can make more money using robots and AI instead of humans, they most certainly will.

So it falls to us to take whatever steps are necessary for this soon-to-happen employment revolution.

If we don’t, it’s no one’s fault but our own!