It’s Past Time to Be Honest with Students and Workers About the Future of Work in America and America’s Future

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

So much is going into the marketing of “the promise artificial intelligence (AI).” Without the necessary security, protections and guardrails in place, the message can be confusing and overwhelming to say the least. So far, AI seems to be a boom mainly for those who would use it to harm others rather than to help humanity. And those who are financing and benefiting from the imposition of AI on all aspects of life are betting the farm on AI thriving long enough to pull their profits out before it is realized for what it was only meant to be.

Let me be clear up-front, I am not against AI when it is used as defined and confined to the things it is proven to be good at and still in the controlled testing stage. But in this day and age, and with the wealthy and opportunistic investors seeing this as “the next big thing” to increase their wealth, so much in the way of safety, security, practicality, and efficacy is tossed out the window. In fact, changes by this administration have removed even more regulations and oversight, and we the people who are most vulnerable are, as we have been for some time, the guinea pigs.

For decades, the narrative students and workers were hearing was that manufacturing jobs were leaving America and are never coming back. At the same time, we saw that German, Austrian, Swiss, Korean, Japanese, Swedish and many other countries were building manufacturing plants in the US. The predominant pretext for leaving we heard from US employers and politicians was that they “just couldn’t find skilled workers” while manufacturing jobs established here were shipped overseas where there were literally no skilled workers but magically a way was found to make product. Now students and workers are kept guessing over whether jobs they are studying for are going to be insourced or near-sourced to a neighboring country, or replaced by AI, but told “if you hurry and change career paths again you might be OK.”

Currently, the media binge-feeds on the conflicting messages with every press release on AI development that is lopped onto the market to stoke investor fires. Nothing needs to be fully tested and secure, just rush it to the market before investors lose interest. So many big tech companies have staked their futures and reputation on AI. Daily assessments of jobs that will be lost to AI, of intellectual property that will be illegally misappropriated for someone else’s use and enrichment, project a hallucination that we will all somehow be better off when it is just the narrow few. This movement represents an attempt at a monumental “repurposing” of the worker in a capitalist democracy…without defining or ensuring that purpose.

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“Now we are in a race with China to be the most competitive in the world AI market. With 1 in 4 of the 734 million workers in China at threat of losing their jobs to AI, why don’t we let them win this race and see how all the displaced workers there will reward their government for making them obsolete… again?”

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Threatening the role of the employed worker and the path to employment, if we are to believe the AI hype, there doesn’t seem to be an occupation that be won’t be negatively impacted if someone will make money off imposing this hardship on others. And it is unclear if the employer will really benefit or are they being misled as well.

No human should be OK with the way this technology is being rolled out and imposed. Sure, we are always told that AI is here to help workers, but nobody really believes that do they? We’ve been told that, and some of it has already come true, manufacturing jobs will be replaced and that service jobs will be replaced, as well. So what is the plan for all of these displaced workers with skills but no income? What is the plan for the overall economy as the numbers of consumers shrink and as the US safety net is continually being torn? The chaos this will create for humanity couldn’t be repaired for decades if humans still had the choice to do so.

Like with past  fabricated trends, workers, students, educational institutions and employers are being “tech-shamed” into “getting on board the AI train” or be left behind.” The AI sales pitch is initially “this will help workers do their jobs better,” but the propensity of self-interested company shareholders will always be for AI to absorb more and more of the work so the employer would be justified in paying the worker less at a minimum, releasing the worker as a “cost to cut” at worst. Tech titans such as Elon Musk has been extremely busy replacing tech workers with AI, which pleased their shareholders and enticed other shareholders of other companies to urge the same.

Some of the jobs promoted that AI will reduce and/or replace the human so far are:

On the manufacturing side:

• Quality assurance positions and Quality Contol
• Project, planning and material control,
• Human resources, recruiters and trainers
• White-collar management positions and blue-collar supervisory positions
• Machine operators, chemical operators, assemblers, welders, and others
• CFO and accounting staff
• Warehouse, procurement
• Mechanical Draftsman, engineering and industrial design

On the service side:

• Customer Service, retail sales, call centers
• The Arts – music, film, canvas
• Insurance underwriting and claim adjusting
• Paralegal, legal, and soon to be judges, transcribers, and clerks
• Computer programmers, cybersecurity experts
• Journalism – video journalism, podcast, radio broadcasting, print journalism, graphic designers and content developers
• Website developers and administrators
• Actors, singers, writers and post-production
• Teachers, Professors, Administrators
• Food and drink (bartenders) preparation
• Financial planning, tax preparation, retail stock trading, banking (all levels)
• Scientists, drug trials, drug development, and testing
• Medicine –doctors and nurses can be replaced by AI, robots used to dispense drugs food delivery and repetitive tasks, lab testing, medical coders, radiologists and medical diagnostics, billing, food preparation
• Psychologists and Psychiatrists
• Meteorology
• Uber/Lyft/Taxi drivers, food delivery, pilots, long-haul, truck, drivers, short haul truck drivers, air traffic control
• Agriculture – from driving the machinery to managing the crops
• Professional Sports – front office, analysts, marketing, and soon athletes
• Government administrative positions, program customer support, crime and code enforcement
• And, believe it or not, mowing and gardening

That covers most of a college or university’s course catalog and more! The only occupations not listed are elected officials, lobbyists, ultrarich multi-national CEOs and investors. Despite the defensive assertions that AI will just make it easier for people in these professions to do their jobs, that will likely mean to do much more work for less pay. Increases in productivity where the profits are not shared with workers. How do you restart and rebuild an economy after all purpose, trust in management and government leaders, personal and family security is lost?

Another popular narrative is that workers and students need to continually change and upskill themselves – easy to say for those who are not sharing their plans to disrupt or destroy jobs, but exempting their own. Students and workers, with very limited resources, cannot change course on a dime. They commit their meager resources thinking they are getting ahead of the curve following the advice of media “experts,” only to complete their transformation and waiting at the station for that train that won’t arrive or was rerouted. Completing 2, 4 or 6 years of education and finding yourself obsolete and in substantial debt after graduation is something hard to come back from.

But the media experts have a solution for that: “the Gig Economy.” Just go out and pick up 2 or 3 low-pay jobs, unrelated to your field of study, while any career-specific skills picked up through your studies are lost to time. Think what you can do with your free time. What’s that? You can’t afford to leave the house? What’s that? You can’t afford a house and had to move back in with your folks? How is an individual planning their future supposed to select a two or four year educational track to prepare them for a desired profession while others are trying to eliminate the job or substantially reduce the requirements so their income doesn’t pay for the student loan as planned?

It is not just the attempt to make everything AI; more and more employers are pulling back from failed AI integration attempts. It is the massive distraction and mayhem it causes while employers experiment only to find out the obvious. Just like manufactures struggling to navigate a troublesome and chaotic trade war just to determine the tariffed costs of materials to make products and tariffed cost of exported finished goods, students and workers are stuck in a “Groundhog Day” existence still searching for the happy ending that becomes more illusive.

We’ve been doing this to students and dislocated workers for the last 40 years. We make big hype in the media about the jobs that students need to prepare for, they willingly and enthusiastically fall for it only to graduate with no job prospects because the jobs were offshored to a low wage country so shareholders can selfishly increase profits for themselves. Then the employers complain that they can’t find skilled workers, which is nothing more than a smoke screen to cover up their short-term focus to import cheaper workers or export the jobs – both needing the same employer-based training as domestic workers. Americans have trusted the untrustworthy for the last 4 decades; following a fabricated vision of the future that, unwittingly, doesn’t include them.

What happens when no one can afford to buy a house, pay utilities, property taxes and insurance; buy food or afford healthcare? What if consumers cannot afford consumer and durable goods and services? What if there isn’t any discretionary income left after necessary bills are paid? Who will pay to watch a sports event, attend a concert, buy a cup of coffee or go out to dinner? Where will they go and what will they become? What happens to those workers caught in the cascading affect started with offshoring and ramped up by AI’s imposition? Will any aspect of capitalism and democracy remain?

The hype around AI by well-funded investors, flooding media outlets with money for fabricated stories of AI success and promise, is eerily similar to the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Under the Reagan administration, the United States poured billions of dollars into building a anti-Soviet defense and increased offensive arms production. This escalation of the “arms race” included the trillion dollar “Star Wars Initiative “  which primarily benefited the defense contractors, the government officials promoting it, and the media whose stories constantly told of the urgent need to ensure that the Soviet Union could not beat us, and that their offensive capability wouldn’t overcome our defensive capability. It turns out the Soviet Union wasn’t the threat they were made out to be. In fact, the Soviet economy was imploding, but that did not stop our government from taking credit for causing that to justify the lavish defense spending.

Now we are in a race with China to be the most competitive in the world AI market. With 1 in 4 of the 734 million workers in China at threat of losing their jobs to AI, why don’t we let them win this race and see how all the displaced workers there will reward their government for making them obsolete? It’s easy to see a country can crumble democratically and economically when that number of unemployed and underemployed generates a predictable revolution, but not before society deteriorates and all hope is lost.

American workers have been following self-serving “advice” of the “experts” for decades and many have come to a disappointing realization of that fact at an increasingly demoralizing rate. Many are wiser now having been duped so many times but still face new barriers. Many of those have given up hope all together. This is nothing that pep talks and more schooling will cure, it takes true leaders – both business and government – to accept they have been complicit in harming American workers while they pursued their personal path to mega wealth. Many industrial leaders are suggesting this may be a time for a long-term US industrial policy that will focus on balanced, sustainable growth of the economy for all.

What is a country for if democratically elected leaders do not enact policies that lift the majority, if not all, of the population, but instead an increasingly decreasing few? What is capitalism if it doesn’t nurture and cherish consumers as the vital lifeblood of all capitalistic activity? Capitalism is currently grossly out-of-balance for the vast majority of workers, and now the few higher up the chain in the upper middle class, the blue-white to white collar workers, may soon find themselves joining those struggling at the bottom. The 18^th century Scottish moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, seen by some as the “father of economics” or the “father of capitalism,” and author of “The Wealth of Nations,” said, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

At this stage, workers are being told that AI has to learn to be effective. So before being terminated, many are feeding the AI mind with whatever they were roughly taught while employed and the sketchy process documentation they could dig up (that is for another article). It’s reminiscent of the beginning of offshoring when skilled workers were asked to train their replacements – either low wage workers imported here under a visa program or low wage workers in a foreign country where the company decided to move its production. If not cruel, this was at least incredibly disturbing and masochistic not to mention the incredible trade imbalance and budget deficits the US has carried since offshoring began that lead to the massive national debt workers are now being blamed for causing.

American workers have been through so much not of their doing. They watched their defined benefit pensions taken away, many have lost their paid sick leave and numerous other benefits so their employers could be more profitable. With the Crash of 2008, the Covid-19 Pandemic and all of the stock market gyrations over the decades, many tried to build wealth for themselves and their families only to have it reduced or lost entirely. They deserve a better world. Students, looking for a career in manufacturing, have lived through their parent’s experience and need to be given a good reason to pursue that path like decades ago when generations worked at the same factory.

Government – local, state and federal – will need to hold employers to strict job creation numbers when asking for infrastructure development, financial assistance and tax abatement to build AI-focused plants if reshoring should occur. Many states have already learned to set specific job creation/average wage metrics to projects; AI will require even more vigilance and resistance to “pie in the sky” estimates. Using hard earned taxpayers money to fund enterprises that would render taxpayers obsolete pours more salt on a wound that has never had a chance to heal.

Granted, much of this AI hype will not materialize or will but not in the complete, altruistic way marketed. But the financial and psychological trauma done to students and our workforce needs to stop. Students are being indoctrinated into AI with a cynical plan to make them less reliant on the core skills schools were meant to impart; let AI do the thinking, writing, analyzing – skills employers claim students lack. Although some employers are using the threat of AI to scare employees into not asking for pay raises and allowing their benefits to be depreciated, many employers are already showing signs of “AI fatigue and disappointment at results” proving a lot of AI is just chaos-causing noise. The break-neck pace at which AI is being rolled out will inevitably create mayhem and confusion before the specific applications suitable for AI are discovered, but why put workers and potential workers through this? There is an appropriate quote that has lasted for generations: “Be nice to people on the way up, because you may meet them on the way down.”

The most obvious, but overlooked, point in favor of going it slow with AI comes from current experience with AI. Everyone should know that what may be gained by AI’s generative capabilities needs to be weighed against time lost by fact-checking and correction, which should be done if one values their work. If not, what are the consequences? Any efficiencies AI proponents predicted may be lost along with the workers who, it appears, would have been more efficient.

If you recognize the real challenges to workforce development, maximizing worker potential and worker retention and have shed your fear of even looking for other practical solutions than replacing workers, check out Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach to see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues.