A future without jobs is looming

He never said the words “Donald Trump” once.

But as innovation expert Ken Coates described a future economy in which jobs are melting away like ice cream on a hot afternoon, I kept thinking of the U.S. president — and of those angry, work-starved voters in Middle America who made the desperate choice to elect him.

Coates spoke Monday at Conestoga College, as part of a professional development day for the college’s leaders, faculty and staff.

Formerly the dean of arts at University of Waterloo, Coates is now a Canada Research Chair at University of Saskatchewan, specializing in regional innovation. He has co-authored several books on higher education.

For the next generation, “the ticking time bomb is underemployment,” he said.

The glory days of the 1950s and ’60s are long gone, when jobs in construction or manufacturing offered a middleclass life to people of “average” ability. Today, jobs are outsourced to other countries with lower wages. Robots have replaced humans in factories.

This is about to spread further, Coates warned. Those forces will soon transform fields like accounting, construction, translation and health care.

“Job losses will accelerate.”

Consider this: In a few years, a computer will be able to diagnose many health problems just by sensing your handprint. A 3D printer will soon be able to create a small house in 10 hours, for $10,000. You’ll be able to speak English into a specially designed cellphone and the person you’re speaking to in Tokyo will hear you in perfect Japanese.

It’s wonderful to imagine, But it will also create a world of “people without jobs, and jobs without people,” said Coates.

Brilliant innovators who are able to drive these changes will always have work. So will creative, artistic people who can entertain and stimulate them. For almost everyone else, there is the poorly paid service industry: mowing lawns, cutting hair.

Coates noted that Enterprise car rental is one of the top employers of university graduates in the United States. Is that what most students have in mind when they think of their future?

As jobs shrink, and competition for them gets more fierce, students will have to focus. They must use aptitude tests to understand what they do well. They have to be realistic about their abilities.

Post-secondary institutions will have to improve by recognizing that some people learn better by doing, others by listening and still others by

watching.

Schedules will also have to change. Middle-aged people whose jobs are disappearing need to retrain part-time. “These are folks who have mortgages and families to look after,” Coates said. “They’re not going to shut down for two years” to be in school full-time.

Smart companies are choosing eager, hard-working people to hire at entry level, and then teaching them the skills they need as they progress, he said.

But any way you slice it, there isn’t going to be enough work for everyone.

One answer is having high taxes on the wealthy so that society can provide a basic minimum income for everyone, Coates said.

He thinks that’s unlikely because the increased taxes on the successful few would be too unpalatable.

Even if it happened, what kind of life would that be? To be deprived of the dignity, the independence, the sense of doing something meaningful, that work provides to us?

We only need to look south to see how Americans responded to economic stress by endorsing a hollow promise to “make America great again.”

Unless we can collectively find answers to the looming work shortage, Trump’s excesses will seem mild compared to who comes after him.