The Challenge of our Generation:
Learning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Technology is changing our lives, our society and our world at an ever-accelerating pace. Our minds are used to seeing and dealing with linear change, which makes it difficult to recognize when change is becoming exponential. We are not on a linear path.
Our workforce has been in turmoil for decades. Globalization, information technology and increasing automation have helped create a generation of job insecurity for many Americans. Nearly 4 in 10 workers are not in what we would call regular jobs — they are in contract, part-time, seasonal or temporary positions — and they are deservedly anxious about their livelihoods. Workers who change jobs 12 or more times in a career — the typical rate for those entering the workforce now — cannot depend on their employers to shepherd and grow their careers.
Artificial intelligence and other automation is accelerating this shift, creating enormous efficiencies and disrupting huge sections of the economy. This process will speed, forcing nearly 40 million American workers out of their jobs over the next dozen years, according to a McKinsey study.
The history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzwiel, “Law of Accelerating Returns”
Amazon’s workforce has increased as they have hired hundreds of thousands of distribution center workers. But part of the job of those workers is to help train robots to replace the humans, which will lead in a few years to “dark” fulfillment centers — dark because robots don’t need the lights on to do the work once done by manual labor.
In industry after industry, artificial intelligence will change and eliminate jobs — retail sales clerks, postal service workers, truck drivers, administrative assistants, fast-food preparers — even many tasks currently done by accountants and attorneys will be transformed. Any task or role that is repetitive and does not require personal interaction will be an opportunity for cost-saving automation. And, at one level, that’s OK. AI can liberate us from much of the drudgery of current jobs.
But, as a society, we are nowhere near ready for this disruption. It doesn’t help that U.S. government projections seriously underestimate the likely impact on workers of these changes. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin dismisses with a wave of his hand the potential impact of AI, saying “it’s not even on our radar screen,” claiming concern might be warranted in “50 to 100 years.”
The shift could be on a scale not seen since the transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s in the United States and Europe. -”Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation,” McKinsey 2017
Responding to this massive change is the most important social challenge of our generation, but so far we are collectively ill-prepared to address it successfully. Most adult education doesn’t serve well the interests of either learners or potential employers. The current system of training, re-training and linking of workers to employment opportunities is fragmented and archaic. Adult learning is broken. It’s expensive and slow. Displaced workers must re-skill: quickly, affordably and with job certainty.
Traditional higher education seems less relevant all the time. Only 5% of full-time students at community colleges graduate with an associate’s degree on time. And just one-in-five full-time students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, with 2 extra years on campus increasing average student debt by nearly 70%. Meanwhile, what students do learn often isn’t used in their jobs. 45% of college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Private adult education institutions aren’t doing any better. Take, for example, Kaplan University, a private-for-profit company, that has a program to train people to become medical assistants, one of the numerous health care roles that will grow over the next decade. (Six of the top 10 growing jobs over the next decade will be in health care, emphasis on the word care. These are jobs such as community health worker, physical therapy assistant, home health aide, and nursing assistants; people to help other people in an aging population.) Kaplan charges $23,000 for a 40-week course that prepares learners for entry-level jobs with annual salaries not much more than the cost of tuition. It’s no wonder that close to 20% of students at institutions like Kaplan default on their student loans. While training providers are charging outrageous amounts for courses that take months or years to complete, health care employers are offering signing bonuses because not enough people have the right qualifications. It’s time for a disruption of the adult learning marketplace.
So what should we do about it?
Part of the answer may come from innovative approaches to higher education being tested in Africa. While helping to lead a new university program in Rwanda called Kepler, I learned the power of being open to new ways of learning. Our goal was to develop a new model of higher education, mixing online learning with intense seminars, and close partnerships with employers. We aimed to provide a high quality US accredited degree for $1000 a year, with a guaranteed job for every graduate.
Our students grew up with challenges you and I can scarcely imagine. Parents murdered or accused of murder. Communities torn apart by ethnic hatred. Crushing poverty. In 2000, 6 years after the genocide, one in five children didn’t live to their fifth birthday.
When I arrived in Rwanda, I found students, orphans of the genocide, who turned out to be brilliant, diligent and sincere seekers of knowledge, full of grit and determination, waiting only for a chance to learn.
It wasn’t easy for them. For most English was their third language. They spoke Kinyarwanda at home, learned French in school, then switched to English as teenagers when the government decided, practically overnight, that would be the official language of Rwanda.
Our students struggled with the complicated English of their online degree and needed to learn basic skills like typing. They grew up thinking that learning meant memorization of what their teachers wrote on a blackboard. Our expectations of questioning assumptions and participating in class were cultural shocks.
Yet, once given a chance, they worked tirelessly and they succeeded, nearly every one of them graduating on time and all of them getting job offers from Rwandan businesses hungry for talent. Their educational opportunity opened up their innate human potential.
Here in America, we should learn from the openness to new ways of learning demonstrated by the Kepler students in Rwanda. We need a new conception worker training and retraining that is low cost, is relevant to the needs of employers in the growing parts of the job marketplace and that reduces the time to skills and new jobs.
This learning needs to:
- be mobile native, enabling learning on smartphones that are the only computing device for many workers now
- be self-paced and adaptive, adjusting learning tracks based on learning progress, not just a pre-set curriculum
- provide deliberate practice, enabling learners progressively to enhance their understanding and skills
- be competency based, so that adult learners can get credit for what they can demonstrate they know and not waste time studying what they have already mastered
- integrate behavioral science-based design to support increased completion rates and identify users who need extra support
- provide high fidelity assessment that ensures that competencies are truly mastered before sending learners to employers
- be closely linked to employer needs in job roles that will not be eliminated by robotics and artificial intelligence
- provide financing mechanisms, probably integrating both employer financial support and income share agreements that only kick in once workers get new jobs, reducing risk for learners making career shifts
Workers can no longer depend on their employers to give them the skills they need to thrive in their next career step. Government institutions are rarely nimble enough to meet the needs of learners and employers in real time. The American, and global, jobs marketplace needs a new low-cost, high-quality lifelong learning platform that can serve as a partner to workers and employers in a tumultuous time.
All of this will require American workers to be open to new ways of learning and shaping their careers. I think we can benefit from the example of the students of Rwanda. If we can be humble enough to learn from the grit and openness to new ways of learning shown by the children of the genocide, then perhaps we can unlock new opportunities for the potential that lies within every one of us.
