Is Bernie right this time?

"I have been watching and reading about AI recently. Not how it works - that is above my paygrade. No, I have been reading about how AI will affect the workforce. Our workforce. A recent article I saw on YouTube said the changes due to AI will first be felt in 2025 (next year)." 

Bernie Sanders, our favorite socialist in the Congress, has come up with another hair brained scheme which he would like to make into a law. Mandate a 32-hour work week and get paid for 40. What a knucklehead idea! What mush! Or is it? The world is changing, the workplace is changing, and we are changing. Maybe Bernie is right this time. 

I have been watching and reading about AI recently. Not how it works - that is above my paygrade. No, I have been reading about how AI will affect the workforce. Our workforce. A recent article I saw on YouTube said the changes due to AI will first be felt in 2025 (next year). We could end up losing over 25 million jobs to automation. From there, it only gets worse. By the end of the decade (six years from now), Goldman Sachs predicts that over 300 million jobs in the US and Europe will be gone. 

I have not told this story for a while. When I was in high school, I went to a state-wide youth conference. The topics were education and the future. Some geeky kid from the south side of the metro, and an interesting take on our future. "Leisure time", he ranted about. We will have so much leisure time, we won't know what to do. As I went through life, and at times was busier than a beaver, I thought about that kid. Where is all this leisure time, I would think? Well, now it might be coming - and fast. 

My wife and I are now fully retired, so this four-day work week will not affect us at all. But it will affect our kids. And our grandkids. My most paramount thought I have had about the future as of late, is much more grandiose. We need to be educating and training our young folk how to live in this brave new world which is coming. And when is it coming? It is already here.

Many of the new jobs that Joe Biden claims have been created due to his "Biden-omics" are only place holders. Many of them will be gone in an instant. New jobs, many of which have not yet been invented, is where the action will be. Where the future will be. The question is, how do we train for something we know so little about? That is the $64,000 question.

The new "Roaring 20's" got off to a slow start with the pandemic. But now it is picking up speed - and lots of it. By the time we get to 2030, our world will hardly be recognizable. Stay tuned and buckle up. Things are about to get very interesting.