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Art Bilger in the Wall Street Journal: The threat of automation is real. We must train our workforce now

WorkingNation founder and CEO Art Bilger had a sharp rebuke to a July 21 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, "Don't Fear the Robots."

By Matt Parke

August 2, 2017

WorkingNation founder and CEO Art Bilger had a sharp rebuke to a July 21 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, Don’t Fear the Robots, by Jerry Kaplan, who posits an optimistic future delivered by the promise of automation.

In the WSJ’s Letters to the Editor section on August 1, Bilger wrote that accelerating advances in technology will not free workers to enjoy the benefits that come with the elimination of manual labor. Instead, automation is a threat to jobs and can deprive workers of purpose unless they re-skill now to live and work with machines.

Bilger’s letter joined warnings from a robotics manufacturer and another concerned reader who point to a growing divide between the technological haves and the technological have-nots. With automation threatening to drive the cost of labor to near zero and creating a class of unemployed obsolete workers unable to afford basic necessities, the rosy picture painted in Kaplan’s article did not tell the complete story.

Access to the WSJ is available with a subscription. WorkingNation is sharing Bilger’s letter in full:

“The potential devastation of accelerating automation on U.S. workers now and in the near future must be addressed with urgency. Even if you buy Mr. Kaplan’s thesis that new service jobs will be created—masses of masseuses—the pain that millions of real workers are going to experience is unrivaled. We must start retraining the American worker now for jobs of the future.

Predicting that everything will be just fine won’t put food on the tables of countless American workers who stand to lose not only their jobs but a purpose in life as automation fundamentally changes our economy.

We owe it to one another to prepare American workers for the future of work. If we don’t, all of the masseuses in the world won’t be able to deal with our pain.”

Art Bilger, Los Angeles

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.