As autonomous vehicles get closer to being commonplace, the question now is what do we do with the armies of displaced truck and taxi drivers.
When Uber founder Travis Kalanick was asked about this earlier this week he suggested that the company may be involved in vocational training for out of work taxi drivers, Tech Crunch reports.
Kalanick’s suggestion raises a number of interesting possibilities – we may see a training levy placed on the new tech companies to fund vocational colleges or develop a new generation of apprenticeship schemes.
The question though is what skills would be best for today’s displaced workers to acquire? One idea is to give them training in statistics in an attempt to address the looming shortage of data scientists.
Another angle could be to train them in programming so they code their way back into the workforce.
Whatever course we take, nations are going to have to face the need to reskill their workforces. Kalanick’s suggestion should be the start of a larger conversation on how we fund that training.