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Over the course of the past several weeks most people have either attended commencement ceremonies or viewed reports about them in media or online.
They are important events because graduation from high school and college has been looked at as the proverbial next big step in the future of a young person. Those days lying ahead is something many of these graduates have been thinking about pretty much non-stop for the past school year.
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For some high school students, it’s the opportunity to focus the next four years of their life studying at a college or a university to gain the necessary skills to some day acquire a good job in the field of their choice.
While at the same time, college graduates look at it as the chance to finally put some of those skills to use getting money in the form of a good job in the line of work they studied for instead of just paying out tens of thousand of dollars in tuition.
It’s a process that has essentially been in place even longer than a half-century ago when my own generation was presented with diplomas in the 1970s and pretty much told, “Go forth and be prosperous young man or lady.”
However, there were some things before my graduation and after that are different than what is taking place today. Back then, the odds were pretty good your studies were going to lead to a job in that field that you knew was going to be there for the next several decades.
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Yes, my generation did have to adapt to technology in those fields, as I did in journalism. When I started working in this field we still used typewriters and film in cameras and by the time my retirement rolled around nearly everything was done on computers and in digital format.
We had to make adjustments to keep up with those changes, but our jobs were pretty much the same, only we were using new technology to do them. In other words, the technology enhanced how we did things, but it didn’t replace us in the workforce.
What started me thinking along these lines were some recent stories in the media recently about how college graduates are concerned about the future workforce. The concerns all stemmed from two words — artificial intelligence.
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Right now, artificial intelligence is the 600-pound gorilla in the room for young people preparing to graduate from college and start a career. At this time, it’s hard to say the size of the role artificial intelligence will play in the future or how many jobs it may replace.
That is a pretty scary thought to a 21 or 22-year-old person receiving a diploma in a certain field of study and carrying tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. No one wants to have spent four years working hard toward a goal in a field that might be obsolete and with jobs performed by artificial intelligence in the near future.
There were numerous media stories out there in the past few weeks about how graduates booed the subject of artificial intelligence when it was brought up by commencement speakers. A recent poll showed 70% of college graduates are greatly concerned about how artificial intelligence will impact them in the job markets of the future.
How can you blame them for being upset? Wouldn’t you feel the same way if a future you had worked so hard for for years was now being considered to be all handled by artificial intelligence?
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It also makes you think colleges and universities are in a time of not knowing what to prepare for in trying to adjust programming for their students of the future for the job market because they still don’t know what direction it is going.
Kind of makes you wonder if when some of those kids got their diplomas this year the people handing them out weren’t thinking like back in my day of “Go forth and prosper,” but were instead thinking “Good luck buddy with artificial intelligence in the future, you made need it.”
Don’t get me wrong. There is so much learning that takes place in a college or university setting to prepare a person for working in all kinds of fields. Kind of like a guy I know quite well who went to college hoping to become a teacher and then spent many happy decades being a journalist.
So I am extending no blame to the higher learning institutions, because they probably are in a wait-and-see mode like the rest of us.
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The difference is we really don’t know which careers or work is going to be done primarily by artificial intelligence. So it’s hard to prepare your studies to meet the needs of the future for a good-paying job.
What I find bizarre is how many of the rich corporate heads get giddy about replacing their workforce with artificial intelligence and robots. Yes, they may save millions and possibly billions not paying out wages, benefits and retirement packages, but have they ever stopped to think about if all of these people are put out of work, who is going to have the money to purchase their products?
Not so smart now are you guys? Having a storage facility of cheaply-produced, high-priced products isn’t going to bring in a lot of product sales if people don’t have the money to purchase them.
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So what does the workforce and careers of tomorrow look like? Only time will tell and it’s something to keep our eyes on long after I see you again on Monday.
Ken Grabowski is a retired journalist who spent more than 36 years in the newspaper business.