The McKinsey Global Institute cautions that as many as 375 million workers will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation.
The work most at risk of automation includes physical jobs in predictable environments, such as operating machinery or preparing fast food. Data collection and processing is also in the crosshairs, with implications for mortgage origination, paralegals, accounts and back-office processing.
To remain viable, workers must embrace retraining in different fields. But governments and companies will need to help smooth what could be a rocky transition.
"The model where people go to school for the first 20 years of life and work for the next 40 or 50 years is broken," Susan Lund, a partner for the McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of the report, told CNN Tech. "We're going to have to think about learning and training throughout the course of your career."
The authors believe we may see a massive transition on a scale not seen since the early 1900s, when workers shifted from farms to factories. The report also cited the potential need for an effort on the same scale as the Marshall Plan, when the United States spent billions to rebuild Western Europe after World War II.This is noteworthy mainly because outfits like CNN had been, until now, entirely focused on giving airtime and mindshare to economists whose entire message was that new technologies would comfortably replace any and all jobs lost to other new technologies. This report is the first I've seen from the CNNs of the world that actually looked at the scale of the problem, and the cost of retraining the numbers of workers who will be displaced by existing automation technologies.
And that is the problem here: we're not talking about the impact of possible future technologies.We're talking about automation technologies that exist now, that are being deployed now, that are displacing workers already, and that are going to displace hundreds of millions of workers, worldwide, in the next decade. These people will not merely be unemployed; they'll be unemployable, through no fault of their own, trained and experienced in jobs that simply won't exist anymore. This is exactly the scenario that "alarmists" have been trying to warn policymakers about, and that has some lawmakers running Universal Basic Income pilot programs.
The good news? Universal Basic Income is looking like it has might be an effective way of tackling the issue. As reported by The Independent:
Support for a basic income has grown in recent years, fuelled in part by fears about the impact that new technology will have on jobs. As machines and robots are able to complete an increasing number of tasks, attention has turned to how people will live when there are not enough jobs to go round.
Ontario’s Premier, Kathleen Wynne, said this was a major factor in the decision to trial a basic income in the province.
She said: "I see it on a daily basis. I go into a factory and the floor plant manager can tell me where there were 20 people and there is one machine. We need to understand what it might look like if there is, in fact, the labour disruption that some economists are predicting."
Ontario officials have found that many people are reluctant to sign up to the scheme, fearing there is a catch or that they will be left without money once the pilot finishes.
Many of those who are receiving payments, however, say their lives have already been changed for the better.
[...]
Finland is also trialling a basic income, as is the state of Hawaii, Oakland in California and the Dutch city of Utrecht.And for those skeptics in the United States, there's this report from Futurism:
In recent months, everyone from Elon Musk to Sir Richard Branson has come out in favor of universal basic income (UBI), a system in which every person receives a regular payment simply for being alive. Now, a study carried out by the Roosevelt Institute has concluded that implementing a UBI in the U.S. could have a positive effect on the nation’s economy.
The study looked at three separate proposals: a “basic income” of $1,000 per month given to every adult, a “base income” of $500 per month given to every adult, and a “child allowance” of $250 per month for every child. The researchers concluded that the larger the sum, the more significant the positive economic impact.
They projected that the $1,000 basic income would grow the economy by 12.56 percent over the course of eight years, after which point its effect would diminish. That would translate to an increase in the country’s gross domestic product of $2.48 trillion.So the question becomes, as developing machine intelligence technology displaces hundreds of millions of human workers, will the world's governments have the political will to actually support them by implementing a "dole" system that looks like the best possible solution? In counties like the United States, where "socialism" is currently a worse political insult than "fascist," and where income disparity is about to get a lot worse as Republicans push through a huge tax break for their wealthy donors at the expense of lower-income Americans and more than a trillion dollars of additional debt, will Universal Basic Income have any chance of becoming a thing in time to matter? And what happens to the global economy if the can't?
And with that, I return you to the Singularity, already in progress.