Not the time for mass immigration, it's tech time
Quality over quantity
The factory of the future will have a dog and a human. The dog will be there to make sure the human doesn’t touch anything and the human will be there to feed the dog.
The rapid change in innovation and automation will have profound consequences on employment and demand for skills. It will also cause a significant disposition to the low and unskilled labour force.
Historically technology and industrial structures were built to provide productivity improvements on unskilled labour. Instead of artisan-built products by skilled craftsmen, machines and assembly lines were set up to get people to do small tasks and put together the final products they couldn’t produce themselves. More people became producers.
Slowly but surely repetitive tasks will be automated with robots and machinery as well. The continuing unionization and wage cost increases make investment into automation more rewarding and fruitful in the long run. This is the point of where we at now more or less in the developed world.
We will see the same operational re-organization towards automation in the retail space, and we already seeing that. We all used self-checkout kiosks. There are automated fast-food restaurants now, and cashierless grocery stores are coming out. Warehousing has one of the fastest transformations and is where many of the recent immigrants end up, but not for long.
In 2014 I warned that the operations of (more specifically) Canadian oil and gas companies are technologically underutilized and that it is priced out of their considerations. I gave a speech to execs in the industry and bankers that after the bull run, during the next downturn, the companies will have to modernize and technologization will mean they won’t need the same amount of personnel. They were upset. We now produce more oil and gas with fewer people in the industry.
Technology reconfigures previous economic orders. Now we also have technology that increases the productivity of using technology; AI. With that, the bottom layer of industries will be gone. Just like we don’t see horse-drawn buggies used as transportation and whaling, which was once the fifth largest industry in the US, for oil is gone.
The minimum skill required in the future labour market will be higher than the one in the past. With that also comes a crucial challenge for creating mobility upwards, upskilling, in the current labour market.
This will be a huge undertaking that is unrealized by governments in the low productivity, developed world countries, like Canada. The developed world doesn’t need more people moving boxes from point A to B cheaply anymore. Robots will do that.
There are too many people working in entry-level/low-skill jobs as a career. Millions of these jobs will be displaced. Immigrating more people with low or unfitting skills to future industries will create even more sociological and economic risk. This is one of the biggest risks facing the developed world - Canada and the US in particular.
There is a fallacy that we need mass immigration to replace our ageing, retiring, population. While it is true in many industries the reality is that it is more looked at like cattle for tax base growth that ignores the technological evolution of industries.
We need to focus on specific skilled immigration and increase our economic productivity. It’s in our best interest to be competitive on high-skill immigration but arbitrary number quota isn’t a setup for success. I can’t stress this enough.
It is paramount and a monumental task for the government to prepare and be a partner for technology-generated disposition within the society. We don’t need UBI, we need action. It’s action or chaos.
There is an incredible opportunity and duty to position Canada for success in the future. What will be happening is an industrial revolution. The incoming creative destruction will create new levels of opulence that we must capture by being catalysts and not alternates.