We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor…
— John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 1933
The job before us:
To adequately prepare our children, or grandchildren, for a terribly uncertain future.
I mentioned yesterday in Part Eight, that the creation of the draft charter school application for Pagosa Peak Open School — a 300-plus-page application that will be submitted in August to the Archuleta School District — was a complex collaborative project involving more than a dozen people (not counting the letters of endorsement from several community leaders.) To make this happen, we depended heavily upon several online tools, including Google Drive and a clever communication service called ‘Slack‘
Plus, of course, ordinary email. We shared literally hundreds of email messages during the 18-month process.
During the 23 years since the passage Colorado’s Charter Schools Act, we’ve seen some significant changes in the way communication takes place in a small non-profit corporation… or within a public school… or even within a family. The collaborative creation of our draft application exposed our team to some new communication formats — and perhaps strange to say, all of the services we used were free. Absolutely free.
All we needed were Internet connections.
Most of the hundreds of hours of research that led to the production of our draft application were conducted online, or involved an Internet connection. Nearly all of our communications with the various school leaders and consultants who assisted with the project took place via the Internet. I doubt we would have completed this task in such a relatively short length of time, without the help of our computers and smart phones. From what I can deduce from this experience, I’d say we’ve definitely left the Modern Age of Industrial Production behind… and have entered the Modern Age of Communication.
Which might be a very good thing, considering the future of Industrial Production. From a 2015 article by reporter Aaron Smith, published on the Pew Research Center website:
A 2013 study by researchers at Oxford University posited that as many as 47% of all jobs in the United States are at risk of “computerization.” And many respondents in a recent Pew Research Center canvassing of technology experts predicted that advances in robotics and computing applications will result in a net displacement of jobs over the coming decades — with potentially profound implications for both workers and society as a whole.
… The ultimate extent to which robots and algorithms intrude on the human workforce will depend on a host of factors, but many Americans expect that this shift will become reality over the next half-century…
So, like.. half of all current American jobs.. are going to be handled by robots?
In 2004, writing in the book Why People Still Matter, authors Frank Levy and Richard Murnane pointed at the difficulties of replicating human perception, and asserted that driving in traffic — for example — is insusceptible to automation:
“.. Executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it is hard to imagine discovering the set of rules that can replicate a driver’s behavior…”
Six years later, in October 2010, Google announced that it had modified several Toyota Priuses to be fully autonomous, able to navigate city traffic without the benefit of a driver.
In 2015, when the Pew Research Center asked 2,000 Americans:
“Fifty years from now, will robots and computers do much of the work currently done by humans?”
… two-thirds of the respondents (65%) answered “Definitely” or “Probably.”
When Pew researchers asked the same respondents:
“Fifty years from now, will your own particular job or profession still exist?”
… four our of five respondents (80%) said they were sure their own particular job would still exist.
Apparently, when we look expansively at the world in general, we have one view of the future. When we look, selfishly, at our own particular job or profession, we tend to have a very different perspective.
I began this article with a quote from an essay composed during the Great Depression, when the future of Western Civilization appeared rather bleak in Great Britain, and in America — written by economist John Maynard Keynes, chief architect of such beloved institutions as the World Bank and the International Money Fund. Here’s another quote from that same fascinating essay from 1931 (which you can download here):
I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not – if we look into the future – the permanent problem of the human race.
Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because – if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past – we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race – not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.
Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature – with all our impulses and deepest instincts – for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose…
When most of our “jobs,” as productive human beings, have been assumed by technological gadgets and gizmos — a process which has been taking place at an accelerating rate over the past 100 years — what purpose will we find for our lives?
When we no longer have the ability to earn a paycheck, how will we pay the rent? Will the robot, who has taken over our job, pay it for us?
These are questions that our children and grandchildren must answer, if they are to have meaningful lives in the 21st century.
Can we prepare them to answer such questions, with a new kind of school?