This is not a joke. Last year, a report by McKinsey Global Institute suggested that up to 800 million careers (or 30 percent of the global job force)—from doctors to accountants, lawyers to journalists—will be lost to computers by 2030, while every single worker on earth will need to adapt “as their occupations evolve alongside increasingly capable machines.” Others suggest this number may be as high as 50 percent. “Machines are taking on cognitive capability, beginning to compete with our ability to reason, to make decisions and, most importantly, to learn,” adds Ford. “At least over the next couple of decades, AI and robotics are going to eliminate huge amounts of jobs. Beyond that, it gets more unpredictable; we really don’t know what’s going to happen.”To find out more, I contacted 25 of the world’s leading universities to ask what, if anything, they are doing to prepare students for the choppy waters of fluid work. Of America’s eight Ivy League schools, only Dartmouth College had something to say, the rest either did not reply, were too busy, or couldn’t find the proper person for me to speak to. And of the eight UK universities I approached, the London School of Economics and University of Sheffield did not reply, while Leeds and Birmingham both couldn’t find anyone suitable to comment. A press officer for the University of Cambridge said she wasn’t “aware of anything Cambridge-specific.”“A lot of people assume automation is only going to affect blue-collar people, and that so long as you go to university you will be immune to that,” says Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. “But that’s not true, there will be a much broader impact.”
This is what the University of Copenhagen calls an “interdisciplinary skills profile.” “We aim to improve students’ opportunities to exploit the potential of digitalization and big data both across the university and with our collaborated partners,” says the university’s vice-provost, Anni Søborg, echoing much of what I’ve already heard. “And we make explicit how programs can be applied in the job market, including a focus on initiatives that ensure students have the requisite skills for innovation and entrepreneurship.”And so, over to America, which Dr. Gleason says is “doing very little in higher education relative to other countries.” “The truth is, we don’t actually know all the jobs we are preparing students for,” says Dartmouth’s associate dean for the sciences, Dan Rockmore. “Dartmouth is the premier liberal arts university in the world. The liberal arts ethos is that a well-rounded and broad education, an exposure to the multidimensional nature of the great challenges of our day, are what prepares a mind for the unpredictable challenges of the world post-graduation. We aim to teach critical thinking, habits of mind that can be brought to bear in many different contexts.”“The whole point of universities is to equip people with the skills to learn,” adds Caroline Jay. “Students are not just here to learn a set of facts, but to learn how things change and evolve, and how they can fit into that future.”
Aoun argues that the only way to create a curriculum for a “robot-proof” education is by fostering “purposeful integration of technical literacies, such as coding and data literacy, with human literacies, such as creativity, ethics, cultural agility, and entrepreneurship.”But he says experiential learning is also essential, and has developed an acclaimed co-operative education and career-development program called Co-op at NU. “We have a network of 3,000 employers in 136 countries on all continents, including Antarctica, where the students apply for paid jobs for six months,” he says. “There they get the unique opportunity to learn how people interact in the workplace, what opportunities look like, what it’s like to work in a different cultural setting; they start understanding themselves better. That is powerful and transformational.”The numbers speak for themselves: Most students do two or three co-ops throughout their college years, and 92 percent of them find full-time work within nine months of graduating.The flood of automation is coming. But Aoun and Gleason say simply teaching students to swim—as the handful of universities I spoke to are beginning to do—will not save them from drowning eventually. Instead, they agree, we need to build an arc. “We must move away from the idea of a university degree being front-loaded in the first 18 to 24 years of your life,” says Gleason. “Instead of a three- to four-year model, students should be admitted for 20 years with the ability to come back and take classes for free whenever they want.”That is exactly what both NU and NUS, where Gleason works, are doing. NUS, for example, has launched two government-supported “lifelong learning institutes,” where graduates can return at any stage of life to “upskill” in hundreds of courses—long and short—from psychology to Arabic, “business agility” to “cyber security for the internet of things.” “We are looking at stacking courses together to reskill adults,” Gleason says. “It’s a long road ahead, but the real low-lying fruit is more experiential learning, and less lectures.”As for NU, Aoun has overseen the establishment of a lifetime-learning network of campuses in Charlotte, North Carolina, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Toronto, and San Francisco where members can return to learn new skills. “Seventy-four percent of the population are what we call ‘non-professional learners,’” he says. “Ignore them and universities will become irrelevant. If we don’t step in and integrate lifelong learning as part of our core mission we become like the railway industry that saw the onset of the airline revolution and said, ‘This is nothing to do with us.’ They didn’t see themselves in the transportation business, and their business suffered as a result.”None of this, of course, comes cheap. NUS and NU are both well-funded institutions. Gleason suggests a tax on robots would cover it. If not, industry needs to step up and cough up. “I don’t see why industry shouldn’t,” she adds. “It’s not like they won’t be profiting from some of the jobs that go away.”So what, in the meantime, can students who don’t go to NUS or NU—or one of the world’s few other universities with similar ideas—do to future-proof their careers? The answer, really, is to become as human as humanly possible. We need to fight back with feelings. “The future labor market needs not content experts or information processors,” says Gleason, “but creators, analyzers, problem solvers, collaborators, and lifelong learners who are able to acquire new skills as old ones quickly become obsolete. The best place you can learn those skills are in the liberal arts.”Maybe, as a start then, that degree in philosophy or English isn’t such a bad idea after all. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.“If robots are going to replace human beings in the workplace, then we need to become robot-proof,” he says. “The rise of extraordinary artificial intelligence requires us to cultivate extraordinary human intelligence. Even today’s most brilliant machines still have limitations. Machines do not yet have a capacity for creativity, innovation, or inspiration.”