The low and middle

So according to tracker stats some of you are reading this by choice which slightly amuses me and makes me question how you spend your time. But onto the rambling, lecturing, ranting even perhaps? As a heads up this one is going to be kinda long compared to the others.


Thanks to automation many simple tasks no longer exist or exist by the grace that paying a human is cheaper than creating a machine or piece of code. Two prime and modern examples are food services and manufacturing.

In food services wonderful devices like this exist. These devices will most of the time create exactly what you want without any issues, complaints, or other problems that can come with humans. The downside is these machines are expensive and complicated depending on the food type.

Manufacturing has the same issue. Before it was economical to ship manufacturing overseas we used machines here to automate it and now even China is looking to automate it's workforce because they are becoming to "expensive".

Lets ignore the rest of the world for now. These two job categories are traditionally held by two groups within the US, the uneducated or the young. For now lets focus on the what would be considered the uneducated. Also for our purposes we don't really care the why or how of why they are considered uneducated merely that they fall into the classification.

Historically people considered uneducated will pick a job and work their way from bottom upwards which up until recently worked pretty well. Lets take McDonalds for example. You could start out a cashier and eventually learn all the stations then move onto shift supervisor and then eventually store manager and depending perhaps even higher. Same with manufacturing you could start out cleaning and spend extra time helping and learning let say a milling machine and then progress into running the milling machine and then perhaps higher.

Now in both these instances lets say you stop at shift manager and milling operator. At both points you aren't making amazing money and you will never be considered rich but you've learned marketable skills and can count on decent living. This was lets say normal fifteen years ago and even possible a decade ago. However these days I would venture both are hard pressed to find.

Lets take the shift supervisor in fast food first. In my experience a large part of their job is scheduling and stock. Before the advent of the massive interconnectivity and computers in general this job actually required skill and depending on the company and level of automation still does. However at many companies this is all handled by computers with a human to just manually adjust, check, and input corrections. So ability and skill are of little to no consequence and anyone can do it. This lowers the pay, rolls the position into another, or removes the position period.

For the milling operator well they pretty much don't have a future. Either the job has been outsourced or more likely just completely automated by a robot. If they do still happen to be around they wouldn't be directly controlling one device and would be supervising the operation of multiple devices.

So technology is starting to remove or at least lower the pay of much of what used to be entry unskilled jobs and what would be considered skilled but uneducated jobs. As technology advances this will even apply to things like plumbers, electricians, who are in the middle ground between the classifications but are definitely skilled labor.

What is worse is unlike in the past there are no clear replacements for these jobs. The technology that is condensing the workforce for once is not also expanding it. Not that it isn't creating new jobs , it certainly is, however its not creating enough to replace the amount taken and nor are all of the new jobs created of the same level as those taken away.

So what are people to do? Move into what are classified as educated jobs? Is that even feasible? Are they even safe?