Robots and the future
Last week, I received an email from a student: “If robots are taking human’s jobs. Will there be any jobs left for people like me? Do you think it will happen in my country, or in Asia where labor costs are not expensive? Please advise.”
Answer: Nobody knows how fast robots will displace human’s jobs, or how many jobs they will take, but it is happening all over the world, in every country, including many Asian countries. Automation is not happened to just factory workers, but also to office workers, bankers, finance managers, taxi and truck drivers and retail workers.
The best solution is to change the education systems to develop new jobs for people to work with the robots or do the jobs that robots cannot do. But the question is how quickly the training can outpace this automation trends. If the education does not change fast enough, there will be massive unemployment that creates chaotic in the society and could destabilize the economy.
Today every student must learn technology skills, and they must continuously learn over their whole life because technology changes fast. If they do not keep up, they will be left behind and fall into the unemployed group. If you are college students, you must quickly learn about technology and develop a critical thinking by consistently aapproach new things, ask questions, find answers, then learn the new things. Everybody need to adjust to changes in their life. Schools will need to teach specific skills that robots cannot easily replicate. For example, creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability, curiosity, and collaboration. Of course, these are things that are not easy to teach but have to be developed by each person because they are personality characteristics.
Today a college education is more important than ever. Most of the jobs that are NOT being replaced by robots require a college education. However, a degree alone is NOT enough. All students must also develop personal characteristics such as compassion, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and creativity which robots could never develop. Even they have a good job; they still have to continue to learn new skills and become lifelong learners to maintain their position in society. The problem is that not everyone is readied to be a lifelong learner, which takes a lot of motivation and discipline. The only way to encourage this habit is to start early when they are young by parents who understand the need and focus on teaching their children to read more, ask more and develop this particular character.
I believe that as long as people learn technical skills and these specific soft skills, they will be able to create new technologies, new jobs for the future and be able to control their future. The current jobs that we have seen today are probably will be done by robots, but there will be new jobs that have not been created yet.
For years, I have written many articles about the need to change the education system. I have not seen much progress, there is so much resistance to change, and many people told me that it would take at least several decades. A social researcher explained to me that any change requires time, money, and leaderships but these things often contradict others. In that case, automation will take over, and until then, it is too late.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
