When I was looking at getting a college degree, decades ago, my father pointed me away from getting a Computer Science degree. This was the late 80’s and early 90’s, and it was his belief that I should concentrate my education in a more grounded engineering background to be able to have a good job in the future. I was a rebellious teen, and instead I studied physics and computer science.
Physics to make him happy, and computer science because I knew where the future was going to be. Now I tell every young person I know that if they want to have a job in 10 years they have to have a computer science background. With out it, they will not be employable.
This is something that Bill Clinton (and most Boomers) just don’t understand. The Market based Capitalism that they grew up with and continue to champion is dying. The process of Getting a Job → Following the Rules → Living a Comfortable Life is fundamentally broken now; And we don’t have anything to replace it yet.
The old economy was mortally wounded in the late 90s when we started figuring out that we could use machines to do the manual and repetitive bits of our jobs. As time has progressed these small repetitive scripts started becoming more and more complex, able to learn and adapt to changing processes.
What once made jobs easier and allowed us to rapidly expand productivity… now is entirely replacing human interaction. As Mathematician and Economist Eric Weinstein warned in a short but powerful essay
...what today’s flexible software is threatening is to “free” us from the drudgery of all repetitive tasks rather than those of lowest value, pushing us away from expertise which we know how to impart, toward ingenious Rube Goldberg like opportunities unsupported by any proven educational model. This shift in emphasis from jobs to opportunities is great news for a tiny number of creatives of today, but deeply troubling for a majority who depend on stable and cyclical work to feed families. The opportunities of the future should be many and lavishly rewarded, but it is unlikely that they will ever return in the form of stable jobs.
Let that sink in… creative digitally driven work is the future of success. Stable by the rules work is the past, and it is dying out with the Baby Boomers.
The fundamental problem of this is that most of our market economy is based on the foundation that hundreds of millions of stable earners will be able to pay their debts. Be that student loans, mortgages, credit cards… you name it. But what happens when those stable earning jobs just go away.
It has been happening for years and we have failed to address it… and I know that people are celebrating increases to the minimum wage, but that is only a band-aid, because those jobs are not going to exist in 10 years.
- Taxi drivers are being replaced by Lyft and Uber drivers… who themselves are going to be replaced by autonomous vehicles.
- Restaurants (both fast food and quality dining) are already starting to phase in service kiosks. In the near future wait staff (and even cooks) will be limited to only fine and luxury dining establishments.
- The manufacturing jobs that are coming back to the US are not your father’s assembly line work… they are specialized small batch machining and rapid prototyping, with fewer actual employees.
- Call center and technical support jobs are rapidly being replaced by automated operators. And these operators are able to take on more and more complex tasks… and the next generation of this software sound like humans instead of the stilted and staccato machines you hear today.
We cannot afford to hold onto the economic ideas of yesterday… the ideas of Wall Street and the Fed. Because they honestly don’t know how to move forward. Instead of pushing for full employment, which may not be possible in the very near future; we need to push for a Universal Basic Income.
We need to discard the Victorian idea that unemployment or living off of the state is a sign of moral failure. We need to detach a living wage from the work requirements of the Welfare Reforms of the 90’s… because there just won’t be enough jobs to maintain that. And instead of resisting the automation revolution (because it will destroy jobs), we need to embrace it… as a means to free people to pursue endeavors (in other words take risks) that they would not have originally attempted.
We are the most prosperous nation in the world, to say that we could not afford this (when a number of other industrialized nations do) is to say that America is not good enough.