Monday morning ruminations on jobs, careers, and the Singularity

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just posted three related stories on student careers and career counseling:

1.  Colleges Must Transform Their Career Counseling

2.  Reinventing the Career Center, and

3.  How Colleges Can Do Better at Helping Students Get Jobs

Coincidentally, I was ruminating about jobs and careers as I drove to work this morning.

Too little, I think, is said (or even thought) about the advent of AI and robotics as major players in the world of work.  "The Singularity" refers to the moment when silicon brains become the equals of carbon brains... when the electronic computer matches our wet computers in brain power.  What then?

I once read a sci fi short story in which people no longer worked.  Rather, we all owned robots who went off to work for us.  Humans were left to fully develop (or not) their personal potentials and enjoy unlimited leisure time.

Of course, that Utopia presupposes a willingness to distribute wealth across society in a way which would be exactly the opposite of the yawning disparity in wealth that characterizes America and most of the rest of the world today.

My wife had occasion on Saturday to complain to the manager of our branch bank about the long lines, resulting from a paucity of tellers.  He blithely told her that, while the bank payed its tellers so little that he was unable to hire more, she shouldn't worry.  Soon we will be going tellerless, he assured her.  All banking will be done on line.  I wonder if he considered what job he would have when that happens.

As consumers we seem to embrace every such technological innovation.  But we are consumers only because we (or someone in our family circle) are wage earners as well.

During my lifetime I have witnessed:

• the evaporation of most well-paid manufacturing jobs due to relocation of plants off shore and the introduction of robots on the remaining assembly lines
• the shift to low-paid, benefits-free and union-free service jobs for millions of Americans
• the concentration of vast wealth in an ever smaller percentage of Americans at the top of the heap
• the related shift from a high school diploma as the entry level credential to the BA and increasingly now to the MA for jobs and careers with any upward mobility at all, and
• the burdening of college grads with "mortgages" on their diplomas that sometimes seem crushing, as too many of them settle for work that is beneath their levels of preparation.

As I have repeated often on this Blog, higher education is experiencing a paradigm shift of revolutionary proportions.  So too is the world of work.  

Not long ago I raised this concern with a well-known American Studies professor from Columbia University, who was giving a talk at my home institution.  He smiled and replied, "Not to make light of your question (meaning, of course, he was about to make light of my question), but students have always found ways to make a living and I expect the current generation will be no exception."

The trick --- while not becoming Chicken Little --- is to recognize when a cycle is no longer a cycle but is in fact a sea change... to recognize an existential threat when it looks you in the eyes.