There are two types of jobs in the world:
- jobs for people
- jobs for machines
Jobs for people are the creative, culture-enriching endeavours of man that would be meaningless were they performed by machines - activities like love, leisure, learning and art.
The other mind-numbing, menial hardships like mowing the lawn, picking tea, peeling potatoes, serving coffee, mining coal and organising emails are for machines.
Unfortunately, many jobs for machines are still being performed by people. This is no more evident than in Africa, where unions insist that at most 50% of tea-picking be done by plucking machines to save antiquated jobs. Inevitably, these repetitive tasks must shift from men to machines as technology advances, but the shift is painful and incites revolt among the obviated ranks.
Long, sweaty hours of machine work have imbued labourers with a sense of entitlement rivalled only by the greed of the unions that cultivate it. Machines have commoditised their defunct skills, but the unions cling to them and demand more in exchange for less. Strikes only slow the revolution down, but cannot stop it. A 5% salary increase here and there extend the expiry date of jobs that are no longer relevant; skills need to change.
All the scribes in the world could not impede the global education revolution caused by the printing press during the industrial revolution. Now we are on the cusp of yet another (digital) learning revolution and the Internet is our vehicle.
We have to stay ahead of the revolt by leading it: design learning machines to educate the masses. Manual labour will suffer in the short-term, but humankind will prosper a thousand-fold when we accept that manual labour is a collective waste of man's precious time on Earth.
Instead of focusing on more jobs, we should be creating better jobs - jobs that let humans read, love, care and explore the universe together.
While machines are digging graves and plucking tea, what will you be doing to realise universal education?