Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if
authorship is acknowledged]
COVID-19 has caused business failures and high levels of unemployment. Many of the failed businesses and lost jobs will not return . . . ever. As deeply concerning as that is, Smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithms (STARA) may also produce permanent, unemployment of unprecedented levels. Social policies such as guaranteed annual wages may help to mitigate the economic impact of mass unemployment. I think it is time to look ahead and consider the part that education should play in preparing successive generations for their responsibilities as productive citizens.
For much
of its history – especially in the post WWII period – education has been
associated with preparation for employment. Even when a smaller proportion of
the population attended secondary school, those who did were often people
preparing for the professions and the clergy. In the post war period, the link
between schooling and work became stronger for the growing number of students.
“Stay in school and get a good job,” parents admonished their offspring. Mine
certainly did.
It paid
off for most of us who stayed in school through to graduation. The booming
post-war economy was fueled by consumer-demand for goods. The growing
population needed more teachers, doctors, nurses, police . . . almost
everything. Generous benefits made it possible for soldiers to attend school,
obtain training and post-secondary education.
Those who
heeded the advice about staying in school benefitted in direct proportion to
their educational tenure. High school graduates were more likely to find steady
employment and earned higher wages than those who did not graduate. Those who
acquired training and post-secondary education did better than the high school
graduates. That relationship persists today . . . for those who are employed .
. . though not as strongly as it once did.
STARA has
begun to change that relationship for many people and the trend is projected to
grow exponentially. Most of the high school graduates who once found employment
in the burgeoning industrial sector have been replaced by robots. The same is
true in the resource sector. Fallers, miners, and derrick-hands are fewer in
number because of mechanization of the work.
The post
war service industry exploded as consumer wages increased. High school students
once earned income from part-time work in drive in restaurants, diners, and
service stations. Today many of those service jobs are performed by early
school leavers and seniors who do not get the benefits typically associated
with full-time employment. Those positions will also decline as the fast-food
sector automates. Robots can work 24/7 (except for downtime for maintenance)
and do not get benefits.
Some
argue that “. . . automation displaces workers who are doing highly automatable
work and tasks, but it does not affect the total number of jobs in the economy
because of offsetting effects. . . . It is important to keep in mind that even
though technology can be a net job creator, it does not mean that the new
jobs created will show up right away, be located in the same place or even pay
the same as the ones that were lost. All it means is that the overall need
for human work has not gone away” [my emphasis]. As Statistics Canada analysts Marc
Frenette and Kristyn Frank point out “. . . even the most carefully chosen statistical
methods can fail to accurately predict the future.”
The
dislocation of employment that may arise from automation and the difficulty in
predicting the future suggest that it is prudent to anticipate and plan for an
education for a society characterized by increasing unemployment and, possibly
mass unemployment. What might such an education entail?
Literacy
will continue to be important. People will need to read and the ability to
evaluate media messages and images (media literacy). Literature courses should
increase in number. There should be greater emphasis on poetry, composition,
especially for artistic expression and written argumentation, i.e., rhetoric
History, economics,
government, philosophy, ethics, sociology, and law will take a more prominent part
in education because citizenship will become more active. People will take a
fuller part in the affairs of their communities and societies. Scientific and
environmental knowledge will allow citizens to understand the impact of their
decisions. Languages should flourish, too, because the world will become
increasingly integrated.
Elective
courses offered at the margins of a school career today will become more
important in an education that takes into account mass unemployment. Music,
carpentry, photography, painting and sculpture, electronics, and filmmaking
will flourish.
These
areas of study look familiar, but their priority in the curriculum and their
focus will have been transformed. The cultivation of the human mind and its
capacity for understanding will replace the cultivation of marketable skills.
To the extent that there is a desire for the development of marketable skills,
those courses will become the elective courses at the margins of the school
curriculum.
Of course,
I am no more adept at predicting the future than anyone else. But there is consensus
that there is simply not enough work to engage everyone today and that STARA
will increase unemployment, eventually on a mass scale. It is prudent to
anticipate today what education for such a future might entail.