the future won't be kind to unskilled labor
how education needs to adapt and teach skills
Think bigger. That is the first phase of the problem. One that has already started. Eg McDonalds.
But is not just unskilled labour that need to worry. You may have more time, but your clock is ticking too.
AI will learn to do your job, better and cheaper than you.
Construction, accounting, engineering, everything. AI will eventually have far fewer limits than humans.
We're moving into an age where all jobs will become obsolete.
Capitalism can not cope with that. Changes will have to be made, or collapse becomes inevitable.
You an I probably have enough time, but our children will have to confront that reality.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
You're right, not everyone is going to be an engineer of some sort. If we don't have unskilled labor, what do we do? Universal income? I've never liked the idea, but if there is no work, what are the other options?
When truck drivers lose out to automation that is going to put a lot of people out of work. We'll still need some drivers where a human has to unload and stock freight. Like a beer or bread truck driver for instance. However, eventually that function will automated too. It will end up being the biggest shakeup of the transportation industry since the shipping container.
Retail is going to continue to shift to an online model, which requires much less labor than physical stores. Food service is already moving to self ordering apps and kiosks. How long until it's a machine cooking your burger too? They already have the technology.
Yeah, UBI is touted as the solution, but I find its supporters never have a firm grasp of economics (both the absurd inflation it would introduce and the huge disinecentive on work it would create since tax rates would have to be massive to support the number of unemployed. It's like they want Atlas Shrugged to happen in real life). Another possibility is mass rioting from the marginalized unemployed masses (would the wealthy elite really give up their wealth easily? If anything the last few decades has shown they have grown in power).
The trend has been clear for a while that the future won't be kind to unskilled labor. With globalization these workers already competeting with hundreds of millions of impoverished workers in the third world, and now domestic service sector jobs are no longer safe.
There are always vague calls about for how education needs to adapt and teach skills for the 21st century, but never real solutions: do we really expect those who were working in McDonalds to pick up differential calculus and become engineers instead? We will reach a point when machines are capable of doing some jobs that were always safe (e.g. truck driver, cashier) better than the workers doing the job, and at that point there is likely to be a cascade of displaced workers without obvious an job transition path. I don't know what the answer is to this, and what is concerning is I've never heard any plausible ideas from anyone either.