AI and Robot Hysteria Get a Little Clarity

Transiting into automation
A new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) titled, Automation, skills use and training, is out offering some clarity for those worried about humanity being helpless as robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) sweep us under the rug.

The 125-page OECD report is meticulously researched, and adds lots of commonsense and straight thinking to the overheated rhetoric that’s got folks everywhere worried about machines jeopardizing the future of humanity…and its workplaces, careers, and jobs.

The report also does a good bit of finger pointing as well; kindly finger pointing, but still, it calls out groups that usually get a pass, like those who run and administer educational institutions in the more than two-dozen countries mentioned in the report.

Although classrooms, lecture halls, laboratories and training facilities may well be engines of excellence in technology, the offices of higher ups in many of these institutions are far from being engines of excellence in realizing technological trends and adjusting the supply of graduates: “If educational institutions had been quick to realize this trend and adjust the supply accordingly,” claims the report, “the developments might have looked very different today.”

The remedy, say the authors: “It is critical to understand that the effects of technological change on the employment and wage outcomes of citizens are deeply dependent on how well educational and training institutions can anticipate demand shifts and how quickly and substantively they can respond to them. While it may be difficult to control the diffusion of technologies, it is certainly possible to mitigate their “dark side” by designing timely and adequate institutional responses.”

How did we get to now?
It’s been a quick six years since that watershed 60 Minutes episode (2013), Race Against the Machines, set off a firestorm of worry about robots stealing jobs. 

Millions probably still recall Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee from MIT’s Sloan School getting grilled about jobs and robots by program host Steve Kroft.

“Technology is always creating jobs. It’s always destroying jobs,” replied Brynjolfsson to a Kroft query. “But right now the pace is accelerating. It’s faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.”  At which, in a seeming nanosecond, McAfee added: “And we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That did it! The sense of imminent foreboding in “we ain’t seen nothing yet” was scary headline material for years thereafter.

The same year, 2013, the Frey-Osborne Oxford study detailed the 702 at-risk occupations and the 47 percent of U.S. workers with a high probability of being jobless.

Like the hysteria of the 1980’s angst over “nuclear winter”, automation was going to be a “robot winter” of terrible unemployment and social unrest that would do us all in.

Manufacturing jobs were going to be goners; it was robots working in the dark 24×7.

Reality, however, hasn’t lived up to the fear mongering. What’s up?  Just as “nuclear winter” was eventually shown to be bit far-fetched, might robot winter? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data show that over the “past 12 months [2018], industrial domains created twice as many jobs” as did the healthcare sector, IT, retail, leisure, and transportation. “Manufacturing alone added 25 percent more jobs than did ‘professional and technical services.’”

Talent overhaul
Of course, nice as they are, “twice as many jobs” and “25 percent more” don’t mean much when stacked against the massive skills gap. “In the United States, there’s a record number of jobs open: around 6 million. That’s just about one job opening for every officially unemployed person in the country.”

Globally, the skills gap affects all developed countries.

Filling that skills gap is the future! It’s the future not only for the U.S. but for the EU and Asia. And according to the OECD report, training, re-training, and re-qualification of workers away from jobs that are “highly automatable to jobs less automatable” is the key to success in filling the skills gap.

“In a Deloitte survey, 39 percent of large-company executives said they were either “barely able” or “unable” to find the talent their firms required.”

In a remarkable and admirable corporate-wide retraining endeavor, AT&T has elected to retrain its current employees…140,000 of them! “The average tenure at the company is 12 years—22 years if you don’t count people working in call centers.”

“Since 2013, when the initiative began, AT&T has spent $250 million on employee education and professional development programs and more than $30 million on tuition assistance annually. AT&T estimates that, all told, 140,000 employees are actively engaged in acquiring skills for newly created roles (And the expectation is that every four years they’ll change roles again.)”