Our Ongoing Cultural Revolution

The song does not date to yesterday. We owe it to Bob Dylan, and especially the line:

You know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?

This past Friday I wrote about the collapse of the knowledge economy, via Ted Gioia. The world of symbolic analysts, of people who work with their minds, is collapsing around us. 

Now, Joel Kotkin suggests that we are watching the fallout from the AI revolution. Blaming it on AI feels like a bit of a stretch, but still, Kotkin recognizes that the job prospects of Humanities majors are evaporating. 

It is not merely the case that universities are not educating young people. They are not preparing them for tomorrow’s jobs. The group in question will be inclined to become rebellious, at the least. So suggests Kotkin:

Today we may again be creating an assertive and angry class — as evidenced in the recent LA riots and the pro-Palestine protests on US campuses over the last year and a half — made up of degree holders. We can see this in recent reports that show the job market getting tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are those professionals on the “soft” side of the economy (finance, accounting, law, coding) whose jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence.

As I said, he blames it on AI:

As AI grows, there won’t be enough jobs to go round, and even if those graduates do get a job, their employers, with so many candidates to choose from, won’t pay well.  

The group most likely to be hurt by these developments are feminists, upper middle class women:

These developments may be felt most by upper-middle class young women, who make up almost two thirds of humanities graduates. This demographic has also been the driving force for campus radicalism. If they were alienated before by the patriarchy and capitalism, just wait till they can’t find a decent job and lose economic power.

As it happens, universities are not doing their job. Their graduates are incapable of doing a good job anyway:

At the same time, employers are increasingly disappointed with the quality of college students, according to the Harvard Business Review. Even the students know the score: more than half (53%) of these college graduates feel unqualified for an entry-level job in their field with nearly half (42%) admitting they did not have all the skills listed in the job description.

Not to be overly persnickety, but if young people are incapable of doing their jobs, it’s a bit of a stretch to blame it all on AI. As for the role of women in all this, we are chagrined to learn that feminist studies programs do not prepare women to work in the world. Again, it is a stretch to blame it on AI.

So, the academic left has been running a racket. Reality is now catching up with them.

People with training in hands-on professions — notably in medical fields as well as technology and engineering — remain in high demand. In contrast, the humanities, where faculty tends to be overwhelmingly Left-of-centre, have lost 25% of their students since 2012.

After all, if there’s no Green New Deal, where does a newly-minted environmental engineer or diversity expert get a job?

How much of the leftist program is simply make-work jobs for people who have been made into social justice warriors. If Trump is eliminating these programs, no wonder they are marching in the streets.