The future of work

Work in society has been pretty much the same since the Industrial Revolution when we moved from an agrarian society to a machine society. That was a time when people who had worked at the same jobs their entire lifetimes as their parents and grandparents did had to learn a new line of work that had been completely foreign to them up until then.

Now we’re there again.

And the change this time is to artificial intelligence, robots and coding. Millions of jobs will be eliminated or at least changed significantly in the next few decades because of machines that have been coded to do things we have done for ourselves in the past or robots with at least enough rudimentary intelligence to do many of the low paying jobs that people are doing and have been doing today before today.

How are we going to react to that change and will the change be as seamless as it was when we moved from an agrarian society to a machine society? I’m afraid it’s too early to tell because many colleges and universities have not yet seen this change as happening as quickly as it’s going to happen and, consequently, they haven’t prepared for it. One of the crucial things we have to realize is that just because someone loses their job to a machine or a code doesn’t mean they’re out of work forever. It DOES mean they’re going to have to retrain and reeducate themselves for the new jobs being created to replace the old jobs they’ve always worked at.

I was having drinks with three other educated people last night and a conversation came up that prompted one of the three to look up the answer on his hand-held computer phone. One of the other educated people who is, in fact, a retired school teacher marveled at his friends’ ability to do that and flatly stated that he would have no idea as to how to even begin to use a device like that.

That’s the transition that societies fall into from time to time and the transition we’ve slowly experiencing today. Our young people know much more about computers and coding than we do so for a brief period of time and, because of that, they’re infinitely smarter and more aware of what’s going on in the world than we are. But this won’t last forever because it never does. Young people will become middle aged and then elderly, taking the new knowledge that made them superior for a while with them while the younger generations will learn what the older generations have taught them.

I remember when I was in the public school system that my folks would often ask me if I needed any help with my homework because they knew and I knew they had knowledge that I didn’t. Sometimes I would take them up on the offer and sometimes I wouldn’t but it was always nice to know that a resource was there if I needed them. Today that resource has been reversed because of the new knowledge young people have that older people don’t.

But that won’t last forever. The learning curve will flatten out and older people will once again be competitive or even superior to our younger generation. But until that happens, the downside will affect people in their 30s and 40’s more than any other age group because they still have decades of work to do before they can retire and a limited reservoir of knowledge to fill that need.

So the best advice to people in those age groups is to look to the future, educate yourself or re-educate yourself in a skill that’s coming instead of one that has been here forever and, in doing that, you’ll secure the future for you and your family.

But if you refuse to keep up with the times and change because you’re too stubborn or too lazy to do what should be done, you’ll be left behind just like people have been left behind in the past who insisted that society change to meet their needs rather than them changing to meet societies’ needs.