The world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor, according to many economists and technologists today. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.
If the fundamental premise of President Obama’s new initiative to make community college free is to open up career and life opportunities for the nation’s young — especially those from underprivileged backgrounds — then the federal government should also be thinking of ways to cover the tuition costs of individuals attending coding boot camps. Instead of paying for a two-year community college program, the government could instead get more bang for less buck by paying for a 12-week program. That’s something that the nation’s first coding president should understand.
Three seismic shifts, in housing, transportation and employment, deserve blame for the fall of the American city.
Suburbs and highways, it seems, are always at the center of the conversation. The decentralization of jobs isn’t as easy to see; it has no well-worn symbol, like the green fields of subdivisions or the canyons of urban expressways. Perhaps job sprawl flies under the radar for just that reason: Skyscrapers, our most visible icons of employment, have continued to sprout even in otherwise dead downtowns like Hartford and Little Rock.
American families are grappling with stagnant wage growth, as the costs of health care, education, and housing continue to climb. But for many of America’s younger workers, “stagnant” wages shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, they might sound like a massive raise.
The topic of job displacement has, throughout US history, ignited frustration over technological advances and their tendency to make traditional jobs obsolete; artisans protested textile mills in the early 19th century, for example. In recent years, start-ups and the high-tech industry have become the focus of this discussion. A recent Pew Research Center study found that technology experts are almost evenly split on whether robots and artificial intelligence will displace a significant number of jobs over the next decade, so there is plenty of room for debate.
On November 7, 2014, I attended the “Idea Jam – Innovating for the Future” session put on by the Pacific Center for Workforce Innovation in San Diego. The purpose of the session was to identify the major challenges to the San Diego workforce in the coming years and to generate audience participation in visioning exercises to explore new and innovative workforce development ideas. The event was held at Colman University, and major sponsors were SDG&E, Qualcomm, the Eastridge Group, Point Loma Nazarene College, and Cal State University, San Marcos.
Alaina Percival never envisioned a career in technology. But after a successful career in marketing and brand management that took her around the world, the 34-year-old quit her job, learned to code, and changed careers. Today she runs Women Who Code, a nonprofit mentoring and education group focused on increasing the number of women in all areas of the technology industry. Percival talks to Cosmopolitan.com about feeling the gender gap in tech and the importance of a good challenge.
College is stressful enough without being blindsided by the true cost of attending
Many of the students now applying to U.S. colleges and universities have almost no idea what it will really cost to go there, if they get accepted. Save the jokes about these kids needing to do their homework. This is not the fault of prospective students—or their families.
If transparent pricing is the key to a healthy market, the U.S. higher education industry should be in an iron lung. Sticker prices for university tuition and fees have surged roughly 1,200 percent since 1978, far outpacing the overall 280 percent inflation over the same period. The average cost of a year of private school tuition is $25,000, with the full cost of many top schools topping $60,000.
Computer science is a booming industry in the US — and it pays extremely well. There’s always demand for sharp, talented engineers, which is why learning how to code can seem like an attractive option.
But, as is the case with any new skill, it can be difficult to know where to start. Here are a few steps you should take early on and programming languages that are best-suited for beginners.
On November 7, 2014, I attended the “Idea Jam – Innovating for the Future” session put on by the Pacific Center for Workforce Innovation in San Diego. The purpose of the session was to identify the major challenges to the San Diego workforce in the coming years and to generate audience participation in visioning exercises to explore new and innovative workforce development ideas. The event was held at Colman University, and major sponsors were SDG&E, Qualcomm, the Eastridge Group, Point Loma Nazarene College, and Cal State University, San Marcos.
To get our creative juices flowing, Master of Ceremonies Susan Taylor, San Diego’s TV news icon, introduced futurist speaker, Thomas Frey, of the DaVinci Institute as the keynote speaker. It is difficult to do justice to his very visual presentation of images of break-through technologies, but his statements alone created much food for thought about the future. He stated, “We are a backward-looking society…the future gets created in the mind. The future creates the present…Visions of the future affect the way people act today.” He rhetorically asked, “What are the big things that need to be accomplished today?
