Reskilling wont save us from AI. Here’s what we need to do instead

Nearly every major policy paper, and the wannabe thought leaders that quote them, says that university enrollment and programming skills are the winning combination for the next Industrial Revolution. My analysis of 11 million professional programmers at Gild completely disagreed. This is not the Industrial Revolution. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment . . . and be honest. You are the CEO of a multinational company with 100,000 employees. Rate all of their jobs on a scale from ‘lowest’ to ‘highest’ skill. Now consider a near future in which AI and automation have disrupted the bottom 80% of those jobs by skill-level. Those 80,000 jobs are not needed anymore, and those lower-skilled employees are staring at pink slips. But just as with the Industrial Revolution, automation, in this case in the form of artificial intelligence, has created an equal number of high-skilled jobs. So you have 100,000 employees and 100,000 great jobs—or maybe even more. This is wonderful! Problem s