Technological has grown exponentially in the past thirty years, and will continue to grow in such a capacity that the past thirty years will be insignificant compared to future growth. Advancement in technology is leading to increased production, capital, and economic growth. There is no doubt that technological advancement is a key factor in the rise of the economy, however there is also a surplus of issues that technology brings with it.  Two major issues that affect South Carolinians is the effect of automation on the job market, and how increased automation leads to the squandering of human skills and abilities. This has a major impact on the youth in South Carolina because they are being raised in an automated society.  They have been raised in a culture where hard work is not required due to the technology available to them from such a young age. Having technology to always perform basic tasks disrupts brain development and impedes the development of certain abilities or skills that older generations may have had and also has leads to increased laziness, resulting in obesity. With technology threatening the future of our youth’s jobs, and the development of their minds and skills, South Carolinians will have to push for change in the way children are taught in public schools.  The change in standards will have to be implemented at an early age in order for children to stay sharp and productive in the age of automation.  

Automation is the process in which machines or computers are used to complete functions and tasks in lieu of human labor.  Automation makes companies more efficient and is more cost effective than hiring human labor.  Most companies, from finance to automotive, are funding a way to use technology to make life easier, and their business more efficient. Tesla and Google both embarked on a journey to create a car that drives itself with very little user input.  This would be revolutionary for the concept of travel and would require teenagers to no longer learn to drive when the self driving car is perfected. While the cars may be several years away from mass consumption, it makes one think about the effect it may have on future generations. With young teens learning to drive in a world where cars are auto-piloted, will future generations be fully equipped to drive the car if something goes wrong during auto-pilot?

 Capitalism was founded under one of the key assumptions that human labor will always be required.  As automation continues to grow, jobs will become more automated, making the demand for human labor decline. With automation taking the place of humans, the economic divide between the upper class and lower-middle class widens. Corporations become even wealthier with having less human labor, and people all over the country and world will lose their jobs to a machine (Newton-Thomas). South Carolina’s main industry is the aerospace and aviation industry in which over 16,0000 people are employed. Particularly in a field such as aerospace and aviation, technological advancement could increase production, resulting in a loss of demand for human labor. The middle class in South Carolina would suffer due to the demand of labor declining. Due to the efficiency of automation, it is clear that technology will never regress and humanity, especially children, will have to learn to coexist alongside technology (Rotman).

With technology able to perform a wide array of jobs, people are likely to be doomed to unemployment if they do not find a way make themselves valuable in an automated job market. A common idea that is suggested when regarding the solution to automation in the work place is to learn skills that machines cannot emulate.  This idea was introduced by David Guest in 1991, and he dubbed these skills, “T-Shaped Skills” because they were a cross of two skills making them extremely valuable.  T-skills have been recommended by several experts, including Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, as the best way to remain valuable in an automated world.  If machines cannot emulate what makes a person valuable, the person cannot be replaced.  This is just one of several solutions of how to deal with automation and unemployment, but the concept of T-skills seems to be at the root of every suggested solution.  Automation proposes a clear threat to our mental faculties as well as our jobs, and the question remains how can we co-exist with technology? Technological advancement will not regress, therefore humans must find a way to retain their value while increasing efficiency and production.  

As automation continues to grow, the negative effect it has on our mental abilities are becoming more and more prevalent.  As humans become more reliant on automation, they begin to lose their skill and abilities in certain fields that they had before technology. This is dangerous if the technology fails and a human is unable to perform a task because they are out of practice or lack the proper skills.  Greg Satell is an author who is a self proclaimed technology advocate who says that technology is “making us both dumb and smarter” in that technology is advancing our intelligence but also decreasing our mental faculties due to our minds not being as sharp because of computers doing our basic calculations. Nicholas Carr, author of The Glass Cage, explains the dangers of automation in 3 main points: automation-complacency, lack of skills, and automation reliance.  The first, automation-complacency is that people are so reliant on their technology that they do not believe it will ever fail them. The second is that when the technology does fail them, they will not know how to perform their activity manually because they have limited experience or are out of practice. The final danger is that if the person knows something is wrong, and instinctually believes something is wrong, they will go against their instinct and trust the technology over themselves (Carr). An experiment in which operators were asked to perform tasks manually they are used to machines doing for them for years. The operators ultimately failed to properly execute their task when the technology failed due to automation reliance (Endsley). Satell actually counters this point by saying that while some skills will degenerate, humans will gain other skills in the process, enabling them to complete these tasks.  While it may be true that humans will gain other skills and be able to be efficient at their tasks, there is no doubt automation is affecting their current abilities.

In South Carolina, education has continually gotten worse throughout the years and is currently ranked the worst ranked public education out of all fifty states.  The standardized test scores for South Carolina students in reading and math were alarmingly low compared to the rest of the nation.  However, the standardized test scores for the country (not just South Carolina) on average are dropping in reading and in math (Pandpan). One reason for this is that once children start middle school, they start relying heavily on calculators as they get into harder math.  This results in children not doing as much mental math, resulting in their minds being not being as keen. Math is a subject that contributes to human wit and brain efficiency. This may be one of the reasons students are not doing as well on standardized tests in South Carolina.  If children do not adapt to the increasing rate of automation in their everyday lives and in school, their brains could under develop and may not maintain skills that are currently important to most adults in the United States. 

Technological advancement is a key factor in the rise of the American (and global) economy. However, the main issue that technology brings regarding the economy is that due to the increased efficiency of technology, the need for human labor decreases. According to Forbes, in the next decade, over forty-seven percent of all current jobs will automated and the need for human labor will drastically decrease (Olivier). Greg Satell says that computers learn the same ways humans do, by recognizing patterns.  However, computers learn at an exponentially faster pace and are able to become experts in many fields, while humans generally only become experts in one or several fields over their entire lifetime.  This proves that computers will outperform humans on laborious tasks and will be more efficient overall. With over 16,000 people employed in the aerospace and aviation industry in South Carolina, automation efficiency is extremely dangerous to jobs.  With increased efficiency, human labor is not as important and people could lose their jobs.  While unemployment is dropping and more jobs are being brought to the state, technological advancement could halt this all together and actually increase unemployment. Jeanne Meister, an economist who mostly writes about technology, seem to be in agreement that automation makes humans less valuable but she also argues that it does not mean that people will lose their jobs.  Jeanne Meister, an economist who mostly writes about technology, says that while humans are not as efficient as technology, humans can make themselves valuable by learning T-Skills, David Guest’s idea which are a cross of two different skills.  This would make them impossible to emulate by computers (Meister).  An example of this would be in advertising where a worker would learn customer service as well as the ability to sell to people.  A computer could not emulate this skill, making that worker valuable. With automation becoming more efficient and will continue to do so, our youth will have to learn to make themselves valuable in the job market in that they can perform jobs that a computer cannot.  

As technology continues to grow and people continue to lose skills and abilities due to increased technological efficiency, children will have to be taught a different way from an early age in order to succeed in increasingly automated world. On the issue of losing abilities and automation reliance, Nicholas Carr recommends that people learn to use the human-centered automation approach. This is where humans make the difficult decisions and use the computers for less important tasks such as calculating or running scenarios. This puts humans at the center of all decision making, also making the decisions more reliable due to no oversight. This is just one theory, and will not likely be implemented in many work places.  David Rotman, author of the MIT Review, suggests that humans figure out how to live alongside technology because technology is advancing at an extremely fast pace and will not regress. The only option is to adapt. He says to do this; humans must learn to develop other skills while they lack the ones they used to have due to automation reliance.  He also says when catastrophe happens due automation complacency, the issue is not the lack of human skill, it is the lack in technology. The solution is for technology to become even more advanced so this does not continue to happen. 

Technology also continues to have a negative impact on the job market and in order to stay a valuable asset, humans must learn to develop new skills. Greg Satell says that in order to do this, schools must focus on develop critical thinking and problem solving skills in order for students to become valuable when they graduate.  If students’ learning is focused on critical thinking and problem solving, they will be a valuable asset in their work environments because they can perform tasks that a computer cannot emulate.  They can solve problems they may face in the world by relating on a human level and use computers to implement the solution and to take action.  This is also why the computer science industry is growing so quickly. People will have to learn to problem solve in order to fix, program, and develop the technology to perform these tasks. This will become increasingly important in the future. Jeanne Meister talks about how humans can no longer thrive in the workplace with a single skill set because technology can perform those same tasks. Instead, humans have to learn T-skills. Since humans cannot perform at the same rate as computers, learning T-skills would be the most ideal way to perform alongside computers in the work place.  The concept of T-skills links with the idea of students having to learn critical thinking and problem solving at an early age to be able to become valuable assets in an automated world. If schools develop children to have strong problem solving and critical thinking skills, thus developing T-skills, humans will have a much easier time adapting to the efficiency of automation and staying valuable to their jobs. 

With technology and automation posing threats to minds of children in South Carolina and to the future job market, it is clear the current generation needs to takes steps to ensure the future of our children and make sure they are able to compete in the future job market and stay sharp.  This starts with education.  Educators needs to be trained to teach students critical thinking and problem solving at an early age (Schmidt, Cohen, 2017).  Many high school have already implemented this in Advanced Placement courses, but according to College Board less than twenty percent of students take at least one Advanced Placement course and less than fifty percent pass the Advanced Placement exams.  While the number of students taking the Advanced Placement courses are increasing, the percentage of students passing the exams has actually dropped since 2003 (Bunn, 2012).  This means that education is failing the students.  Students are able to graduate high school without ever being challenged from a critical thinking standpoint and then are thrown into the real world without any genuine ability to perform in the job market. This needs to change.  The education is South Carolina needs reform to focus on critical thinking and problem solving starting in Kindergarten and continue to make them the main focus throughout primary and secondary school (Schmidt, Cohen, 2017).  

Implementing critical thinking based education starts by reforming the Carolina Core standards. Carolina Core is a program that requires students to take a certain number of different types of classes.  Carolina Core is the minimum requirement for students to graduate and students can complete it without challenging themselves at all.  While not all students are capable of completing harder classes, such as Advanced Placement classes, we need to see a higher number of students taking them and this starts from primary school.  Children need to be developed to challenge themselves and need to be able to take these sorts of classes to be able to make themselves valuable and keep their minds sharp.  The future of children in South Carolina is in the hands of the South Carolina Education Department, and massive reform needs to take place if we are to develop children to thrive alongside technology.  