Page 54 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
3.1 A FUTURE WITH NO DRIVER
It was Andrew Yang’s job to create jobs. As the founder of non-profit organisation Venture for America, he used to place top graduates from the best universities around the country at start-ups in US cities in desperate need of employment growth. These often included traditional industrial centres such as Detroit and Baltimore that are heavily reliant on one particular industry, or even on one large multinational company. The idea behind this initiative was to use the energy and talents of these young and bright individuals to stimulate new kinds of ventures and industries, to eventually broaden the scope of employment opportunities in these somewhat economically backward, one-dimensional cities. And although he loved his work, Yang was overcome with anxiety, eventually changing course completely.
The source of his anxiety stemmed from the devastation of the American workforce participation rate – currently sitting at a multi-decade low of 62.9%, in line with that of El Salvador and Puerto Rico. As a key contributor to this trend, Yang points to the accelerating rate at which jobs are being automated, exacerbated further by the rapidly advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence in almost every imaginable field of work. This fear was further entrenched in Yang after being the CEO at Venture for America for over six years and extensively touring the country to better understand the employment landscape. It was then that Yang began to realise that the economy had changed almost beyond recognition to what has conventionally been understood as the way of life and work in America.
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