Myself and Christopher Rice (@ricetopher) have started writing a book on the life and work skills that a child entering their first year of high school right now will need in 15 or twenty years time. There is a lot of stuff around about the disruptive effects of technology (especially robotics and artificial intelligence) will have on work and the economy over the next twenty years but we wanted to focus on the conversations that parents are having with their teenage children about these things right now.

There are a large range of issues to consider and we will be posting examples of our thinking to this site over the next few months as we write.

As an example of this consider the situation where your sixteen year old daughter or granddaughter is considering becoming a motor mechanic. What advice would you give them.

Picture:NYdailynews

In order to train as a motor mechanic the individual concerned must think there are reasonable chances of good employment as well as having a passion for mechanical things. Due to the length of training you would want those prospects to be long term. The prospects for a motor mechanic in 15 years time are highly dependent on a range of interacting factors:

First of all it is clear that robotics and computer technologies have had their greatest impact on routine manual and cognitive (sense making/ intelligence) jobs that can be easily automated. Think robots in car manufacturing plants, online accounting packages, or websites that now sell all sorts of travel products and services.

Secondly it is now obvious that technology is now pushing into areas that have much higher requirements for intelligence and creativity and are less routine and therefore less easily automated. Examples include driverless cars, journalism (An NPR Reporter Raced A Machine To Write A News Story. Who Won?), specialised manufacturing (Cheaper Robots, Fewer Workers), and even senior management (Here’s How Managers Can Be Replaced by Software). Recently there was even a story about machine systems rapping (Machine learning algorithms can ‘bust a rhyme’ better than humans by 21%).

Thirdly it is in the interests of business to make most work more routine because this affects the balance of power between employers and workers and therefore costs. Routine jobs require less skills and therefore on average wage levels will be lower. If wage levels are high in routine jobs they are under more risk of being replaced by technology because the economic case is better.

Fourthly there is a risk of overall disruptive change in the industry you choose to work in.

So let’s look at that from the point of view of a teenage girl thinking of becoming a motor mechanic.

Cars have clearly become more complex over the last decade and are becoming travelling computers and software platforms as much as they are a form of transport. To the extent that John Deere and GM have recently asserted that you don’t own your vehicle, you only purchased the right to use it in order to protect their software(GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it). Tesla updates its cars via software releases over the internet.

Generally one would think that increasing complexity would mean that the skills of the mechanics would have to rise and therefore it would be a good job to have. However there are several factors pushing this in the opposite direction:

• The software systems are so complex that the job of monitoring and managing them is being increasing taken over by automated machinery that is moving towards a plug and play model that both diagnoses and fixes the car without human involvement.
• Being a motor mechanic for specific brand of cars is essentially working in a closed system. The cars are all manufactured to a specification that is well known and understood. This means that the system you are working in is much more open to standardisation.
• Companies such as BMW are introducing augmented reality systems that are able to recognise the car they are looking at and supply instructions and videos and augmented overlays that assist mechanics in doing their work. With massive investment and development of augmented systems around the world for a multitude of uses it is likely that these systems will rapidly improve. These sorts of technologies are very useful but they tend to lend themselves to de-skilling the workforce. If a mechanic is able to follow detailed and useful instructions overlaid on to their field of vision then there is less need for training. Less training means lower skills and easier replacement by others. Both indicators of lower wages

In the longer term the advent of driverless cars will greatly affect the job of the mechanic. There are various views on the timelines for the full scale implementation of driverless car but we view it is inevitable and likely within 15-20 years.

Currently our cars are idle about 94% of their life. The full implementation of driverless cars will mean that a large percentage of cars will be used far more as they move from transport job to transport job as de facto public transport system. Therefore the standard car is likely to do 60-100,000 km a year instead of the current 15,000 km. It also makes sense as a business model for driverless cars to be less personalised than in the past as we move from ownership to rentership[1].. Therefore very large scale model runs of cars that have greater durability and can be easily and systematically maintained make more economic sense. We will probably design cars that have lifetimes of 500,000 km but will still only last 6-8 years.

That means that the processes of fast food franchises/manufacturing plants will be applied to car servicing. This will include modularised systems that can be robotically swapped in and out of cars on a production line, with other servicing carried out on the same line Therefore skilled mechanics will be less in demand and will be replaced by a sort of basic manufacturing job.

Therefore our view is that the future job of motor mechanic for your daughter or granddaughter is much less promising than it seems currently. We would recommend that you steer that mechanically minded teenager more towards the field of robotics and drones which show much more promise and likely demand, but more on that later.

We would welcome your comments and debate

Paul Higgins and Christopher Rice

[1] A term used for moving from a system where we own most things to a greater percentage of the physical products we access being rented rather than owned.