Preparing Youth for the Future of Work

Over the past few evenings, I’ve been escaping from the news of the day by reading some science fiction. Or at least I thought my choice was science fiction. The book, Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford, describes how automation threatens jobs and industries not in the distant future, but in the coming decades. Ford points out that while advanced technologies and automation have the potential to improve our lives by offering driverless cars, digital finance, and data-driven medical diagnoses, these advances also threaten jobs and industries.

Indeed, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors recently estimated that between 80-100 percent of long-haul trucking jobs would be eliminated by driverless vehicles in the next two decades. Other reports indicate that as many as 47 percent of all jobs in the US will be eliminated or transformed by automation and advances in computer technology. While disruptive, our well-educated workforce should be able to adapt and hopefully prosper from these changes. But, I thought, what of the developing world and especially its next generation of workers?

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