Jobs without college

Bill Gates never got a college degree. Neither did Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Most American high school grads won’t get a degree from a four-year college or university. What will they do?

I was on a FB thread yesterday that supported vocational training and listed about a dozen jobs that don’t require a college degree. Among them were plumbing, carpentry and truck driving. And that’s true today. But the interesting question is whether those jobs will still be around in 40 years or replaced by automation or robots.
Long haul trucking looks to be the first on that list. There are already autonomous vehicles on the road. In 10 years, it is very likely that most long haul trucking will be done by autonomous vehicles—they don’t get tired or sick, they don’t have families and they don’t take weekends or holidays or amphetamines.
A lot of new housing is pre-fab, with walls and roof fabricated at a central location by robots and then trucked out and assembled on site. The assembly may still require some human input, but many carpentry and brick-laying jobs have already been destroyed this way.
Of course, self-checkout is replacing clerks in grocery stores already. Agriculture is increasingly robotic. Drones are likely to replace truck drivers for local deliveries of food and other goods.
Of course, the disruption and job loss isn’t solely in blue-collar jobs. Watson can already read X-rays, MRIs and CTs more accurately than MD radiologists. AI and machine learning are able to compete with physicians for routine diagnoses. Robotic surgeries are becoming routine in some conditions.
In 10-20 years, a lot of the jobs that are still being done by humans will be done by machines. Yes, it will be important to be adaptive. But if that’s supposed to be the job skill of the future, then what we need is more adaptive training, not simply more vocational training.
Also yesterday came across this online article about robotic lab technicians. Industry has been using robots, combined with miniaturization of assays and microfluidics, for years to automate drug discovery. Crystallographers use robots to test thousands of crystallization conditions to accelerate structural biology. All of these replaced manual labor done by people. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/robot-chemist-can-complete-experiments-1000-times-quicker-than-humans/?fbclid=IwAR0vZhtf5gK2sahI9CulFWeIXyc2WEHIgZAbolboYrgwbLeRblKmLidzD3k

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more