What Happens When A Skill Becomes Obsolete?
In 2010, when Adobe Flash was put on a death watch, the tech world did not implode and thousands of unemployed flash workers did not suddenly flood the market.
So what did happen?
A working paper takes a look at how the employees that were affected by the death of Flash adapted to the change, and perhaps can offer insights and ideas into how other employees with skills that are moving towards obsolescence can adapt themselves, and/or how society (business, government, etc.) can help them adapt.
The key thing to me is to note that skills don’t die suddenly. There is an inflection point that signals the coming end. Sometimes that signal is loud and clear, like a major company announcing that a given technology is no longer supported. Sometimes it’s a bit harder to define the inflection point. But regardless of the clarity, the writing on the wall if always there, whether or not we choose to see it.
For instance, the days of internal combustion engines are numbered. The need for technicians who keenly understand the operation of piston driven combustion cycles is likewise going to decline. It’ll probably be decades before that need is fully eclipsed, and I suspect gas turbines will remain a thing long after the last cylinder block is melted down and recast as a battery case, but even turbines will be eclipsed someday.
We also have the problem of old technologies that refuse to die because it’s inconvenient for entrenched interests. For example, coal, or COBOL.
In my humble opinion, the reason we have trouble with skill sets that become useless is not the march of technology, but the old ideal that a given skill set learned early in life is the only skill set a person needs to make a living. Older generations could enjoy that ideal because it was mostly true. You could learn one set of skills early on and use that until retirement.
It’s just no longer true.
Even skills that are still in demand (welder, plumber, carpenter, etc.) evolve rapidly, and a plumber who started out working with cast iron and copper has to adapt to PVC and Pex. Honestly, these days, most of the skill of a plumber or electrician is less in the tech, and more in the familiarity with building codes (although a plumber or electrician who can snake a wire or pipe through a wall without tearing the wall board out is worth every penny).
Luckily, I think most young people have a clue that diversity of skills and a willingness to constantly engage with and become proficient in new technologies is critical, which is a very good thing! Still, there is no reason we, as a society, can’t provide support when it’s clear that a skill set is on the way out.
The good thing about being a Lisp programmer is the skills transfer to a lot of programming languages. Plus Lisp has a “smarty pants” reputation that impresses interviewers.
But you’re right. These days learning to learn new things is a critical skill, plus having a spectrum of knowledge. Even if I don’t have experience with technology X, I can tell an interviewer that I know Y, Z, and Q, and the difference is often just the name of API calls. Plus Stack Overflow exists.
A few years back a team I was on was hiring Clojure programmers. We explained to the recruiter we didn’t care if the candidate knew Clojure specifically. Instead we gave them a broad list of keywords, including Lisp and Haskell. We ended up with two Midwestern guys, one from Indiana and one from Wisconsin. They were both eager to relocate. Those two were the best devs I ever worked with. Both were Haskell nerds. It wasn’t an accident.Report
I think our customary definition of “skills” needs some examining. Right now, “skill” can mean both designing a building and creating the documents for its construction.
I think its more useful to separate the two and separate skill into its components of knowledge and labor, because technology is rapidly parsing out labor and leaving only knowledge.
Using my field as an example, what architects (like almost all professions) sell is a combination of labor and knowledge. Technology has made the labor skill increasingly cheap and value-less, but knowledge less so.
When I started in the field in 1981, just communicating a design idea, from loose napkin sketch to finished technical blueprint was a highly developed skill requiring years of experience. A person whose sole skillset was drawing technical documents could earn a middle class living.
But now, CAD software has made it such that with only months, or even just weeks of practice, a person can produce professional level technical documents. The goal of software is to become invisible, so the distance between the conception of an idea to its documentation is collapsed to zero.
But the software doesn’t tell you what to draw or model; The knowledge component is still valuable and lucrative. It’s just the labor component that is diminishing in value.
But even knowledge isn’t immune to being diminished by technology- machines that think are to knowledge skill, what electro-motive power was to labor skill, in a competitive race which machines will inevitably win.
What we are all working for is at its most base level, wealth. We can say we work for pleasure or fulfillment and while that may be true, the most essential purpose of work is to receive wealth to sustain our lives.
Wealth is just natural resources converted by labor and knowledge into useful things.
Which is to say wealth is just a combination of capital, property, knowledge skill, and labor skill.
In terms of “what happens when a skill becomes obsolete”, I think the most useful formula would be:
Capital>>Property>>Knowledge>>Labor.
Every human is born possessing labor; Most acquire knowledge; many acquire some level of property; but few acquire capital.
Capital, liquid capital, is the most potent and resistant to diminishing because it is the most rare.Report
Yep, the skills that can be automated keep expanding. JB likes to point at GPT-3. Here’s an example of an essay produced by GPT-3. That’s an overstatement; GPT-3 produced written material that was then manipulated by an editor using typical cut-and-paste. The editor’s remarks at the end of the essay:
The biggest takeaway for me was the last sentence: it took less time to edit than many human op-eds. Picking a topic, writing brief instructions, and editing were still necessary skills. Doing online research and writing out the first draft? Not so much. Most high school composition classes are now reduced to being an editor.Report
GPT-3 doesn’t have to be good at being brilliant.
It just has to be good at being mediocre. If it can achieve mediocrity, it can compete with… let’s be kind and say 40% of the content out there.Report
40%? You’re getting soft.Report
I understand that this happens in the autumn years.Report
Capital, liquid capital, is the most potent and resistant to diminishing because it is the most rare.
Then why are giant corporations sitting on tens/hundreds of millions of dollars of cash? Why aren’t they being presented with large numbers of good ideas for applying it?Report
Because there is an incentive to sit on it (market uncertainty, wall street loves to see swimming pools of cash)? Because there is no incentive to apply it, or no incentive for the C-Suite to go looking for ideas, or no good ideas making it to the C-Suite?
Just spitballing…Report
This is the challenge. A plumber will still have his labor skills for running and repairing pipe, but if it hasn’t happened yet, I bet you we’ll see an app that parses local codes and handles a big chunk of that Knowledge part. What we’ll see more of isn’t the plumber is the guy with the labor and the knowledge, he’s the guy with the property that makes him an effective plumber. That app costs money, plumbing has specialized tools that cost money.
Even the tools I build, which are free to our customers, are useless without a license for our core software, which costs money*.
So yes, you are right in that as more and more labor is automated away, we will shift towards property and knowledge.
The question is, what are we, as a society, as a species, doing about that? Your “not very bright” person used to be able to learn a basic skill and live a life on that. We keep holding the status quo while pining for the good old days when a simple man with poor schooling could still get a ‘good job’ at the factory or the mine. Sure, it’d probably work him to an early death, but he wasn’t on welfare, etc.
IMHO, we either need to completely rethink how we do primary schooling, or we need to look hard at a UBI. Because the simple labor and simple knowledge tasks, the one that can be automated, are getting automated.Report