Prepare now for jobs that will be lost to technology - Youngstown Vindicator

We all know that times change.

Ours used to be an agrarian economy. Then an industrial economy. And now a technological and service economy.

These evolutions are driven by visionaries who invented steam engines, locomotives, telegraphs and telephones, automobiles, assembly lines, aircraft, radio and television, computers, 3D printers and a million other things that have changed life in ways that had not been imagined.

Most of us are just along for the ride. But we ought to be able to expect our political leaders to be a bit further ahead of the curve than the rest of us – in other words, to lead. Instead, our leaders too often react to what has already happened and do their best to convince us that they have a plan to reverse history. It is clearly better to be proactive than reactive, yet our political conversation focuses on jobs already lost rather than on jobs endangered by the next wave of technology. Voters are encouraged not to prepare for the future, but to get angry about the past.

The loss of manufacturing jobs and mining jobs has devastated families, crippled regions and hobbled whole states. Trade – often unfair trade – has been a contributing factor. But technology has replaced people in plants and mills. In mining, new equipment and technology has made it possible to extract coal from the surface or beneath the earth with fewer workers. Market forces, too, have played a role, as new technology has allowed the extraction of natural gas that is cheaper and cleaner than coal.

Those who yearn for the good old days are remembering a time 50 or 60 years ago when one in four Americans had a job in manufacturing. The plant floor was a place where a man with a high school education could expect to provide a middle-class lifestyle for his family. Today, fewer than one in 10 works in manufacturing.

Manufacturing wages

American manufacturing wages average $26 an hour, while those in China and Mexico are $2 or $3 per hour. Any tariff high enough to offset that difference would do more to drive up prices on imported goods and start a trade war than return to the United States jobs that already have been lost.

And for the blue-collar worker, things are going to get worse. Technology is coming for a whole new group of workers, and virtually no one is talking about it. Through three presidential debates, no moderator and neither candidate brought it up. We’re talking about jobs in transportation and delivery – jobs that today pay well, but will begin to disappear as nascent technology matures.

Two weeks ago, a tractor-trailer rig outfitted with Uber technology delivered a load of 50,000 cans of Budweiser across 120 miles of Colorado highways. A driver got the big rig onto the Interstate and then sat back and did nothing for the rest of the trip.

It seems that autonomous vehicles are on track to become a reality long before anyone outside of the high-tech community would have imagined.

Nearly 70 percent of all goods going to market in the United States are delivered on trucks.

According to U.S. Department of Commerce statistics, there are 1.6 million tractor-trailer drivers in the work force. There are more than 168,000 bus drivers and 180,960 taxi drivers and chauffeurs. And there are 826,510 light truck or delivery drivers. That latter group has to worry about another emerging technology, drone-delivery systems.

Millions of jobs on which today’s families rely are going to disappear, some within the next few years. Now is the time to start talking about this next wave of job losses and what it will do to the economy. It is the time to recognize that just as time waits for no man, neither does technology.

A hundred years ago, it took 350 man-hours to produce a ton of steel; 50 years ago, it took about 80 man-hours. In the 1980s it took about 10 man-hours, and today, it takes 1.9 man-hours. It takes fewer works to produce more cars today at Lordstown than when the plant opened 50 years ago.

Schools at every level must provide the basic and specialized education that will prepare everyone for the kind of jobs that will be available in years to come. Our leaders should be talking about the challenges of the future, not playing on the fears of those who look to the past for comfort.

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