George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 8 August 2018.]
Used to be that for most jobs you had to show some serious education and experience in your background in addition to good appearance and character. And things really got tougher during the depths of our last recession, employers could be real picky about whom they hired. Well things have now changed, and the change confirms the new growth track that our economy has taken since the 2016 election.
According to some leading staffing firms, we hear of companies now hiring people, not necessarily on the basis of what they know, but how motivated and teachable they appear to be. One such large firm “estimates one in four of (its over 10,000) employer clients have made drastic changes to their recruiting process since the start of the year, such as skipping drug tests or criminal background checks, or removing preferences for a higher degree or high-school diploma.” Of course, one demonstration of teachability and motivation is what kind of skillsets you’ve been able to garner on your own. (more here)
Several staffing firms are even turning down clients who are not aware of today’s jobs landscape, and refuse to budge on tight salaries, required education, and relevant experience. Their message to such employers is “we can’t help you fish for the few underpaid or unaware applicants (still) left out there.”
Before we start celebrating this new twist in the employment picture, let’s consider the kind of people, specifically voters, that such hiring practices will produce. Pre-educated hires will be taught a very narrow and focused set of skills in their new workplaces – initially, just enough to do the job. From where would they then get the breadth that a broader education provides about our country, societal issues, basic civics, and fields other than the one in which they have landed? My concern is that prematurely terminating an education will produce a lot of what may be called one-tune piano players – good at what they do, but knowledgeable in little else.
We already see examples of that when we look at today’s wealthy and prominent entrepreneurs who quit school early, pursued their dreams, and were successful beyond their wildest hopes. And now that they’re rich, their uninformed opinions on matters way outside their fields are valued as if they were oracles on Mt Olympus. But the overwhelming fraction of today’s young early hires will not become rich, and they will have to pick up their broader knowledge of the rest of the world and its happenings from backyard BBQ conversations, and whatever time they can spare after work from family and TV. Not a promising path to becoming an intelligent voter, and a very promising way to become someone who will base their vote on a silver-tongued politician’s unexamined and most recently broadcast sound bite.
So let’s turn the page from this hiring surge and consider what more and more experts are saying about the longer term prospects for jobs, people who understand the increasing role of intelligent machines in the workplace. As you have heard in these commentaries, machines are replacing humans at an increasing rate in all kinds of tasks imaginable. In the latest (7aug18) issue of Forbes, Dr Kiran Garimella, chief scientist & CTO at a high-tech company, writes ‘Job Loss From AI? There’s More to Fear’. He points out that we have already started the transition from human to machine workers. And the skills most “immune to AI” are also “the most impervious to mandatory formal training methods because they stem from innate passion or prodigy-like natural skills. Examples are higher math, theoretical physics, the higher levels of art and music, and so on.” In short, not too many of us are blessed with those passions and natural skills, and even those workers will see “their role will become either minimal or move up the cognitive scale.”
Personal relevance remains the overarching issue. Contented people have always found a good answer to ‘what do I do that sustains the community of which I am a part?’ When that question no longer has an answer, then social order becomes brittle, and all futures look uncertain and not very promising. How many voters even now understand enough to prepare for such a future?
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment