The future is Robots, anyway. Should focus more on Education to bring out future engineers, scientists, mathematicians, scholars or things benefiting art & marketing that Robots wouldn't compete. Can't believe America is starting to think manual labour, now. That's an aim, for a country like Bangladesh.
That's the attitude that got us in the mess we are in and helped usher in the paradigms that have created so much income inequality in this country (I'm referring to the US). It's an elitist attitude that assumes all manual labor is mindless labor. In fact, much of it is very highly skilled and requires a significant amount of training and apprenticeship. I daresay my friends who are trademen have put in even more hours of study at their trades than I did getting my business degree.
Not everyone has the personality or the ability to sit still and be a scholar. What do they contribute to society anyway, in practical terms above and beyond the men and women who make and fix and build things? I've known more than a few that seemed educated beyond the degree to which their common sense is capable of functioning--because they do some pretty damn fool things with other aspects of their lives.
The fact is for my entire generation we have been focusing on creating engineers, scientists, mathematicians and scholars--and Wall Street denizens--and ignoring the trades. And you know what...there's not enough jobs for all of the intellectuals, either.
My husband has interviewed and hired at least three employees who were trained as scientists. One woman has advanced degrees and notable credentials in particle physics, if I remember correctly. She ended up being hired on as a project manager in a field completely unrelated to science and had to be retrained a bit to function at her new job. She said she could not make a living at science because the field is crowded, funding and opportunities are few and not guaranteed, and only the best of the best and most well connected can thrive at it, and they are still competing with scientists who are close to 60 years old with even more prestige than any "kid" with fresh degrees in hand can offer.
That's a big problem...no matter what field you go into now, many are overcrowded and our college grads end up having to do jobs entirely unrelated to their degrees and end up having to be retrained.
Oh and by the way, artificial intelligence and automation IS actually replacing white collar college educated workers, too. I read about the problems paralegals face as their tasks have become computerized.
There are opportunities to make a decent and non-soul sucking living are out there, but they're not what your teachers and professors will tell you they are...those people are trained to plow you back into academia or into offices and cubicles. That's not a life for everyone. In fact it's a death sentence for a lot of people who are temperamentally unsuited to it.
Which is why I'm enrolling my preteen in an experimental program that pairs middle schoolers with local artists, farmers, beekeepers, tradespeople, aquarists, carpenters and so forth. These are people who work with their hands AND their minds and are also successful at it and who know where the opportunities are and how to become an entrepreneur using these skills. These are successful people flying under the radar in our economy because for an entire generation we turned our noses up at anything that wasn't heralded by the intellectual elite who promoted the idea that to work at a trade was to consign yourself to a beer gut, dirty hands and ignorance.
We need more "stuff" going on in this country. Yes, robots will be doing a lot of manual stuff, but we still need stuff happening so that there will be opportunities somewhere in there for even a handful of humans. That's a handful out of unemployment. If that's my kid in that handful, I'm happy.
