- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, given my background in information technology. Simply put, is there any room in the economy of tomorrow for people on the left side of the IQ bellcurve?
The common argument that parallels this question is that "technology destroys jobs"; however, if you examine closer, what is really happening is the shifting of jobs from those of lower skill to those of higher skill. This largely happens because anything that is repetitive and mindless (data entry, food service, warehouse work, factory work) is subject to automation. And who is responsible for building the infrastructure that eliminates these jobs? Those who work in fields requiring very strong brainpower. The people who work in these fields are the math whizzes you knew growing up: whenever something was taught in school, they just got it, while you and everyone else labored over problems endlessly to score a B+.
The counter-argument frequently given by champions of automation (not coincidentally, the same geniuses creating these highly-skilled jobs) is that this shift from low-skilled work to high-skilled work will be a largely painless transition, facilitated by an increase in highly rigorous STEM education and training. The troubling observation I've made, however, is that these same pundits assume that the transition from lower- to higher-intelligence work is attainable to anyone who is willing to just study hard enough. But the trouble is, "studying hard enough" is insufficient to graduate a rigorous college program. You need to possess a concurrent set of aptitudes, those immutable characteristics that we are often tested for throughout our course in K-12 education. To assume that today's middle class of warehouse & factory workers, as well as tradesmen, could cut it in occupations requiring an advanced understanding of mathematics and algorithms is excessively optimistic. The jobs that automation is transforming are giving way to jobs that are largely dominated by people on the tail end of the IQ bellcurve, while most people fall in the middle. All the studying and education in the world could never enable them to transfer to these jobs. They simply lack the physical brainpower.
Everything that does not challenge your problem-solving aptitudes day-to-day is subject to elimination by machine. Menial data-entry jobs are fast being replaced by sophisticated OCR software. More and more factories are entirely autonomous, staffing only a small amount of workers to repair the machines when they malfunction. Foodservice and retail are prime targets for the next generation in automation technologies: a McDonald's or Wal-mart operating without staff is not far-fetched. In the far future, artificial intelligence (of the more realistic "weak AI" variety) will eliminate even more desk jobs that demand even an average aptitude for problem-solving. The only thing a machine cannot replace, at least in our current understanding of computability theory...are strong problem-solving aptitudes. Eventually, the only people who will even be capable of employment are geniuses in the top one percent of the IQ pool.
Where does this lead the real ninety-nine percent: those of us who labored over our math homework to score average grades, those of us who seldom understand articles on advanced physics, those people who can't even muster the brainpower to set the time on their VCR? Will we require this CWCville-like socialist dystopia of everyone requiring public assistance? Karl Marx wrote of how alienating repetitive factory jobs were; imagine how alienating it must be to know you lack any ability to make a real difference in the world, to know that you have little choice but to waste away, on public assistance, with no meaning in life.
We will one day come up against an economy where the most basic jobs demand high intelligence; what then becomes of the masses who lack the physical brainpower to concieve of their most elementary concepts?
The common argument that parallels this question is that "technology destroys jobs"; however, if you examine closer, what is really happening is the shifting of jobs from those of lower skill to those of higher skill. This largely happens because anything that is repetitive and mindless (data entry, food service, warehouse work, factory work) is subject to automation. And who is responsible for building the infrastructure that eliminates these jobs? Those who work in fields requiring very strong brainpower. The people who work in these fields are the math whizzes you knew growing up: whenever something was taught in school, they just got it, while you and everyone else labored over problems endlessly to score a B+.
The counter-argument frequently given by champions of automation (not coincidentally, the same geniuses creating these highly-skilled jobs) is that this shift from low-skilled work to high-skilled work will be a largely painless transition, facilitated by an increase in highly rigorous STEM education and training. The troubling observation I've made, however, is that these same pundits assume that the transition from lower- to higher-intelligence work is attainable to anyone who is willing to just study hard enough. But the trouble is, "studying hard enough" is insufficient to graduate a rigorous college program. You need to possess a concurrent set of aptitudes, those immutable characteristics that we are often tested for throughout our course in K-12 education. To assume that today's middle class of warehouse & factory workers, as well as tradesmen, could cut it in occupations requiring an advanced understanding of mathematics and algorithms is excessively optimistic. The jobs that automation is transforming are giving way to jobs that are largely dominated by people on the tail end of the IQ bellcurve, while most people fall in the middle. All the studying and education in the world could never enable them to transfer to these jobs. They simply lack the physical brainpower.
Everything that does not challenge your problem-solving aptitudes day-to-day is subject to elimination by machine. Menial data-entry jobs are fast being replaced by sophisticated OCR software. More and more factories are entirely autonomous, staffing only a small amount of workers to repair the machines when they malfunction. Foodservice and retail are prime targets for the next generation in automation technologies: a McDonald's or Wal-mart operating without staff is not far-fetched. In the far future, artificial intelligence (of the more realistic "weak AI" variety) will eliminate even more desk jobs that demand even an average aptitude for problem-solving. The only thing a machine cannot replace, at least in our current understanding of computability theory...are strong problem-solving aptitudes. Eventually, the only people who will even be capable of employment are geniuses in the top one percent of the IQ pool.
Where does this lead the real ninety-nine percent: those of us who labored over our math homework to score average grades, those of us who seldom understand articles on advanced physics, those people who can't even muster the brainpower to set the time on their VCR? Will we require this CWCville-like socialist dystopia of everyone requiring public assistance? Karl Marx wrote of how alienating repetitive factory jobs were; imagine how alienating it must be to know you lack any ability to make a real difference in the world, to know that you have little choice but to waste away, on public assistance, with no meaning in life.
We will one day come up against an economy where the most basic jobs demand high intelligence; what then becomes of the masses who lack the physical brainpower to concieve of their most elementary concepts?
