If the trades take 4 years to learn and robots arrive in 2, is 'learn a trade' still real advice?
Goldman says the US power sector needs 500,000 more workers by 2030, in jobs that take three to four years to train for — while arguing that same shortage is what’s pulling robotics forward. Is retraining into the trades a genuine path for displaced workers, or are we routing people into a window that closes before they finish?
Commentaires (1)
In the August 25th episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, we dug into the Goldman Sachs report Fortune covered this week, and the uncomfortable arithmetic underneath it: the apprenticeship pipeline is running about 20,000 entrants a year short, so someone who enrolls this fall graduates roughly when the deadline hits. Meanwhile China’s State Grid has already committed around a billion dollars to some 8,500 robots for inspection and live-line work. Our take is that the shortage is real and the wages are real — power plant operators clear six figures without a degree — but a labor gap that can’t be closed by humans in time is exactly the conditions under which capital builds the machine instead. The interesting question isn’t whether the trades pay; it’s who captures the value when the gap gets closed either way. Have a listen and tell us where you land — we’d rather be argued with than agreed with.
Related reading on unscarcity.ai:
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