The race between self-driving cars and education

The connection between education and employment has never been better explained than in Katz and Goldin’s The race between technology and education. Katz and Goldin describe an education system in the US that emerges over a period of, say, 1850 to 1950, in response to the needs of industry. That system includes nods to business (my mother-in-law rest her soul learned shorthand, the 10-key add[ing machine], and touch typing, all skills that are gone away or that are going) and to academe. The premium attached to college education is more slight when there are union jobs or at least good-paying jobs for young adults who have specific skills. But as the job market matures (and as unions go away, at least in the US), everything changes: The extreme targeting of specific jobs and matching those with specific skills goes away. 

The auto-manufacturing market (it’s a market for graduates from the point of view of educators) is a case in point. At present, specific skills are in demand, sufficiently so that where there are factories there are jobs

and there are high-school graduates to fill them. 

(Don't miss the irony, btw: The auto industry gave education one of its most persistent frameworks, one in which teachers are the producers and students are the products; now as the industry's needs and those of society are changing, that model is woefully inadequate and has produced [see what I did there?] students who have become educators and decision-makers who are themselves limited.)

In the future, as demand for new cars dwindles, demand for specific skills will dwindle as well. The ability of TVET to shift to meet the need for specific skills will be undercut by increasing need for general skills and capacities—empathy, communication, problem-solving. But each of these skills in isolation won’t be enough. You need to employ all three, probably, to be successful.

And add to that, um, innovation. Or creativity. 

Driverless cars, the gig economy and education worldwide

(CC-BY licensed image from megadox.com)

What are the implications for education of change in the automobile industry?

Decreased efficiency of TVET plus increased importance of academic curricula.

Change drivers in the auto industry (and thereby in TVET) include: 1) The development of driverless cars; 2) the gig economy. These two emerging events are linked, of course, because gig-economy capitalists look fondly on the possibility of not investing in gig-economy labor. In any event, these factors are going to lead to the reduction in auto manufacturing.   And auto manufacturing is a big-deal sector, worldwide; there were about 94,000,000 cars made in 2016, by more than 9 million people supported by another 41 million employed in “indirect” jobs related to the industry (per the International Organization of Vehicle Manufacturers, or OICA).

We don’t imagine that people are going to make fewer trips — on the contrary — but we can predict that they will buy fewer cars. If car ownership costs me US $4,000 per year in California (where we _know_ we will get driverless cars first), that’s probably approx 200 trips. In which I can use my phone and my laptop, focus on my conversation with my lovely wife, Sandra, swap texts with my niece, read the new york review of books, see the Democracy Now! podcast, and generally enrich my life or increase my productivity (which fortunately might include building knowledge of popular culture as embodied by, say, Game of Thrones or Dear White People) and by doing anything other than driving. And, I’m not competing with the guy with the Tesla or the guy with the Corvette, I’m in the car that arrives with me in it.

And this car is unowned by me and by any other individual. So why would I buy my own car? 

Once “my” car arrives and offloads me it’s off to the next pick up, all night and all day long. One car doing the work of three or four cars belonging to three or four Uber drivers who (I hope) sleep sometime. 

So the use of cars becomes more efficient. 

So what does that mean for school systems in the US and elsewhere. The US is 2nd-largest manufacturer of cars in the world; China is the first, and has been since 2009. If I'm not buying a car, and neither are the three or four Uber drivers who have been made redundant by Uber's driverless metal beast, we're talking a serious reduction in demand for the automotive industry's product. (Over time, not right away. This all might start in California, but we are a ways from exporting driverless tech to, say, Burundi.)

I visited a vocational-education secondary school in Indonesia in 2010, a country that produced over 1 million cars in 2015.  The school is really well run, but of course jobs-for-graduates are the sine qua non of both school performance and community satisfaction. As new hires at the local auto manufacturing plant started to dwindle, the principal reached out to ask, Huh? What? Why? 

The auto guys responded that in fact they needed new hires with CAD (Computer Aided-Design) skills. So the principal lobbied the school-community committee or association or whatever to purchase a CAD system (US $200 for educator versions in 2010, between $1 and $4,000 for businesses). The community ponied up and the kids gained skills and were again employable. 

TVET is huge. It’s the closest thing to demand-driven education that we have. And also the most consistently implemented program of learning by doing. We can assume that TVET will evolve to pace change in the auto industry, as best it can. But we should also assume that there will be a huge drop-off in demand for new cars and the workers who (would) build them.