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Most people don't like change. But the days of a reliable job that lasts for 40 years is far behind us.
True, and more and more jobs are being automated. It is becoming like a game of musical chairs. As the chairs are removed there is less and less opportunity to retrain for jobs or careers that are being downsized, outsourced, automated, or wages being dumbed down. Retraining will become less and less of an option. And age discrimination after 40 makes it even worse.
True, and more and more jobs are being automated. It is becoming like a game of musical chairs. As the chairs are removed there is less and less opportunity to retrain for jobs or careers that are being downsized, outsourced, automated, or wages being dumbed down. Retraining will become less and less of an option. And age discrimination after 40 makes it even worse.
I'll find out about that age discrimination. But when I was younger, I didn't have the skill sets to get the jobs!
I'll find out about that age discrimination. But when I was younger, I didn't have the skill sets to get the jobs!
Yes, it is a paradox. When someone is younger, they don't have a decent skill set. But they are cheap to hire if they can find a job. So that is what is becoming in style in the working world. When they get experience and develop an accomplished skill set they become too expensive to retain. Also, their brain power is starting to fade at 40. They become set in their ways and not open to new ways of doing things that are thought up by smart and innovative younger employees who still have their peak brainpower.
Yes, cheap young and poorly paid employees are the way to go these days. If you're over 40, you're out of luck. Maybe that should be the new slogan these days.
Luckily as an ancient person over 60, I still have managed to retain my brainpower and ... wait a minute I forgot what I wanted to say. What was I just talking about? Oh, well here comes the senility that I should have gotten when I was 40. We gotta go sometime.
Let's not forget that there are literally 1,000's of new jobs out there we didn't have even 10 years ago: to wit.
We've addressed this. Many of these jobs are narrow in focus, deep in training and are likely to be limited themselves by advances in automation and AI. The vague hand-waving notion that people who would have gone into replaced fields, or are in them, can just move into these new fields is mostly nonsense. It always has been. It may have been easier for mechanically-inclined farm boys to go to work for Henry Ford, but as careers get more and more specialized and required years of training, the idea that accountants can suddenly become AI experts is laughable. That's not even addressing how forty-five-year-old retrainees can't compete against twenty-two-year-old new trainees.
And then consider that many new fields may be designed or shaped to function with extensive automation or AI support right out of the box. They aren't going to go through a phase with thousands of workers per plant and the like.
Why do you think it's nonsense that a person spend a few hours/week keeping up with new technologies, building new skills, and networking in case they lose a job?
Nothing here is magic. Spend just 5 hours/week every week studying/taking classes/networking, and you'll be surprised at how secure your future becomes.
This sounds technically true but this is much harder than it sounds. If you are single living in an apartment than sure, this is doable. If you are in your mid 40th, with kids and a house and a long commute and all the demands of middle class life style than this is a lot harder to do.
Name any form of automation or efficiency engineering that created more jobs than it replaced, ever.
Umm, every one, ever? Name one that hasn't.
Automation increases efficiency. Increased efficiency allows more economic goods to be produced with less inputs, which equals greater wealth. The dividends of that increased efficiency grow the economy and provide the funding for new innovation.
If your doom-and-gloom outlook were based in fact, we'd all be living in mud huts from 300+ years of mechanization, automation, etc. Instead, the economy is multiple orders of magnitude greater than it was back before all that terrible, job-stealing progress!
I used to be a programmer. I transitioned into a BA/PM role. There's an enormous need for people who can translate between the technical folks and actual business needs.
It jobs aren't going away, they are just changing.
This is how I see it. Being a programmer is not (necessarily) a highly sought after profession anymore. Being able to work along side the business, speak their language and then get results is still highly valued.
When I left school 6 years ago I didn't feel it was easy to get into (a good paying) tech job easily and I feel it's gotten way more difficult for young people in recent years.
Automotive assembly automation. The workforce that builds and maintains this equipment is probably 1/10 or less the size of the workforce it eliminated.
Note that the Tesla plant (after the Roadster era) was built to be highly automated - there was never a "normal" workforce building Models S and later. (That's what hung them last year when they had no way to speed up production.)
Remote IT management. I was there when a server farm needed 100 employees; some now have one wire monkey who flips switches, re-jacks panels and swaps dead servers at the direction of someone halfway around the world who's watching five such plants. Not to mention thousands of businesses that no longer need an IT guy full-time, if not two or three. All remoted to a fractional number of supervisory services.
Quote:
Automation increases efficiency. Increased efficiency allows more economic goods to be produced with less inputs, which equals greater wealth. The dividends of that increased efficiency grow the economy and provide the funding for new innovation.
You forgot the page cite, there.
Quote:
If your doom-and-gloom outlook were based in fact, we'd all be living in mud huts from 300+ years of mechanization, automation, etc. Instead, the economy is multiple orders of magnitude greater than it was back before all that terrible, job-stealing progress!
Ah, yes, the "it's never happened before therefore it will never happen" argument. I really need to make a numbered list of these for convenience.
The entire point is that we're on the cusp of major changes, some of which have already happened and others of which are in progress, that are not evolutionary in the sense of jobs morphing into others, but will create large and sudden workforce reductions in areas that have been long considered "automation proof." The blithe historical assumption that field hands will become cotton gin builders, farm boys will become Model A builders and accountants will become IT managers simply will not hold water from here on out - the vastly smaller workforces with highly specialized training will not come from retraining or reassigning existing workforces. (It almost never has - look at the plight of specialized workers in Detroit when massive automation and modernization made them obsolete. Most died on unemployment, scanty pensions and substandard jobs... which, yes, solved the problem.)
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