Technological advancement in the United States (and the world) 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. increase 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, nd how increased automation leads to the squandering of human skills and abilities. This has a major impact on Millennials because they are being raised in an automated society.  Millennials have been raised in a culture where hard work isn’t required due to the technology available to them from such a young age. Having technology always perform basic tasks disrupts brain development and impedes the development of certain abilities or skills that older generations may have and also has lead to increased laziness, resulting in obesity. In South Carolina, education has continually gotten worse throughout the years and is currently has 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 SC) on average are dropping in reading in math. Clearly, something has changed in the past ten years that would be causing students to perform worse in the classroom. While there are other factors such as wealth, culture, and healthcare, technology has had on impact on student’s critical thinking abilities. 

 Capitalism was founded under one of the key assumptions that human labor will always be needed.  As technology continues to grow, jobs will become more and more automated, making the demand for human labor drop. With automation taking the place of humans, the economic divide between the upper class and lower-middle class grows. Corporations will become even wealthier with having less human labor, and people all over the country and world will lose their jobs to a machine. 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. This would lead to more unemployment and the middle class in South Carolina would suffer. Due to the efficiency of automation, it is clear that technology will never regress and humanity, especially Millennials, will have to learn to coexist alongside technology. 

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?

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 term that is spoken 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 has to perform a task and is unable to 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 don’t 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.  The first two points go hand in hand and is the most dangerous to humans.  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 dulling their minds.  South Carolina is currently one of the worst ranked states in public education and automation may be one of the reasons for 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 less sharp.  Math is a subject that contributes to human wit and brain efficiency.  Due to calculators, mental math is not as common, resulting in slower brain efficiency, which may be a reason students are not doing as well on standardized tests.  If Millennials 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 has lead to increased production, capital, and economic growth. 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. 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 life time.  This proves that computers will outperform humans on on laborious tasks and will be more efficient overall. Capitalism functions on the understood notion that human labor will always be valuable.  With technology becoming more and more advanced, production is becoming increasingly efficient, making human labor less valuable.  With unemployment rising, this would ultimately create a society where the rich get richer and poor get poorer.  This would lead to the middle class deteriorating and there would become an ultra rich and ultra poor. 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 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 doesn’t mean that people will lose their jobs.  Jeanne Meister, an economist who mostly writes about technology, says that while humans aren’t 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.  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, Millennials 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, people need to learn to change how they develop from an early age in order to succeed in increasingly automated world.  The first issue is that humans are losing their skills and abilities due to technological complacency and 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 isn’t the lack of human skill, it is the lack in technology. The solution is for technology to become even more advanced so this doesn’t continue to happen. With South Carolina having one of the worst public education rankings, one of the best ways for students to increase their production and scores may be to cut back on automation and let students develop their critical thinking and calculation skills. This translates to other tasks as well. Make beginners learn to do everything manually, and they will have a better skill set when performing the task at hand with technology. 

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 that 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 fast too.  With technology becoming more and more efficient, people will have to learn to problem solve in order to fix and program the technology 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. These skills are uniquely human and would be extremely difficult for a machine to emulate. 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 technology.  If humans can learn T skills and schools develop children to have strong problem solving and critical thinking 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 Millennials in South Carolina and to the future job market, it is clear the current generation needs to takes steps to ensure the future of Millennials and make sure they are able to compete in the future job market and stay increasingly sharp.  This starts with education.  Educators needs to be trained to teach students critical thinking and problem solving at an early age.  Many high school have already implemented this in Advanced Placement (AP) courses, but according to College board less than 20% of students take at least one AP course and less than 50% pass the AP exams.  While the number of students taking the AP courses are increasing, the percentage of students passing the exams has actually dropped since 2003.  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.  This starts by reforming the Carolina Core classes. 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 AP 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 fate of Millennials is in the hands of the South Carolina Education Department, and massive reform needs to take place if we are to develop Millennials to thrive alongside technology.  

 