Digital Technology and the Skills Shortage

Governments and businesses in many advanced countries complain about the current skills shortage. They blame it for high wages, lowered economic growth, outsourcing, the need to import skilled workers, the failure of medical care, the high rates of car accidents and unemployment, and pretty well any instance of technical malfunction and project failure. The irony of this is that digital technology could be used both to raise the average skill level of most young people and also to depopulate jails by using the same technique to rehabilitate the misfits who so often end up there. To achieve this, however, our whole approach to education must be redesigned, the education profession reorganized, the school system remodeled, and parents constrained to share the responsibility for their children's education. Even then, it would take a generation for the investment to start paying off