Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0180467169
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/12/28/023202/sal-khan-companies-should-give-1-of-profits-to-retrain-workers-displaced-by-ai
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/opinion/artificial-intelligence-jobs-worker-training.html?unlocked_article_code=1._08.sGPG.39XLXKSUfVyh&smid=url-share
"I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... [1]dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced ."
> This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow — through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous...
>
> Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training.
"The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly."
> To meet the challenges, we don't need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge...
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> There is no shortage of meaningful work — only a shortage of pathways into it.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [2]destinyland for sharing the article.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/opinion/artificial-intelligence-jobs-worker-training.html?unlocked_article_code=1._08.sGPG.39XLXKSUfVyh&smid=url-share
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~destinyland
Retrain to do what? (Score:2)
It's basically hubris at this point to think you can predict a job that will still be around in 6 years.
Re: Retrain to do what? (Score:2)
The job is likely to be around. It's just a matter of who or what is performing it.
Re: (Score:2)
Generate training content for the chatgpt, of course.
Re: (Score:2)
There are quite a few ones that will reliably still be around in 6 years. Just the largest pool (somewhat generic desk-jobs) may not be.
What's special about "AI" ? (Score:2)
Why shouldn't they get the same amount if they are displaced for any other reason?
Annually? (Score:2)
My job pays annually. What about this 1%?
Seriously (Score:2)
Why didn't we make mines retrain mine workers when dynamite took their jobs? Or make farms retrain farmworkers when the combine was invented?
First off, we don't know if AI and robotics are going to cause even field specific unemployment. The signs actually look like it won't --it seems like every field is going to expand. But let's say it does cause unemployment, how is a company supposed to know what to retrain a worker to do? They don't know each person's interest, they don't know where the market is goin
Re: (Score:2)
> First off, we don't know if AI and robotics are going to cause even field specific unemployment.
We can be pretty sure that it will happen, because:
1. For most goods, there is a limit of how much of it is needed.
2. Automation will increase efficiency, so less workers will produce more.
3. Required amount of workers for certain good = [required amount of goods] / [amount of goods that single worker can produce with automation]
4. Even if we can invent new products, like hologram games, those products almos
Football coach model (Score:2)
Keep paying them a salary until they find another suitable job, with a requirement that they actively search for one.
Limit payouts to say, 3 years or 5 years or something along those lines.
What jobs? (Score:1)
But AI and robotics are coming for ALL jobs. Retraining humans makes little sense.
Re: What jobs? (Score:2)
My job was unlikely to be done by AI. Hell, it could barely be done by a human. Just way too much uncertainty involved on a day to day basis. Throw in people changing their minds all the time, running meetings of various kinds and so forth, etc. just seems unlikely.
Maybe in 5-10 years, MAYBE.
I would definitely still be doing it if I had not quit.
Re: (Score:2)
Not all. But every mostly generic desk-job is at risk, at least until the bubble bursts.
Who'll think of the poor billionaires (Score:2)
But you can't do this. How would the billionaires survive if you took even a little of their money off them?
What is this "retrain" thing? (Score:3)
Is that were you turn miners into software engineers? So does he propose to now do it the other way round?
Re: (Score:2)
When the US, Mexico, and Canada signed NAFTA back in the 90s, a guy in Oregon who's career had been that of a logger since he was 18 lost his job.
Fortunately, built into the implementation of the treaty was retraining. That guy went to school, graduated magna cum laude from college, and became a teacher of mine.
That's what retraining is.
There are plenty of jobs, and echelons of jobs, that AI isn't coming for any time soon, and of course- the AI needs jockeys.
Permanently Unemployable. (Score:2)
> "I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced."
Retrain to do WHAT exactly? Since AI is targeting the human mind to replace, I believe we need to put shortsighted idiots out to pasture and fucking leave them there.
The problem is AI doesn’t just make humans temporarily unemployed. AI and automation will make enough humans permanently unemployable. With “enough” defined as the 20-30% unemployment rates that create and sustain mass chaos and violence in every street when there isn’t enough “re-training” to feed every
Re: (Score:2)
Society has a long and storied history of paying the small folk not to kill and eat those making the money.
Still feels like a regressive solution, somehow.
I can think of several things to retrain for.
Software engineers. LLM jockeys. Facilities and maintenance. DevOps.
Low end software engineers are cooked. LLM jockeys are needed. Facilities and maintenance aren't going anywhere. DevOps will be assisted by AI, but not replaced.
Is the problem not obvious? (Score:2)
Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year
Well, there's your problem.
If we look at dollars as tokens of labor, we as a society are allowing an extremely limited number of entities to possess an extremely ridiculous amount of tokens that should instead be possessed by the labor-producers, the people. This extreme concentration of power in the hands of a very few individuals is both an injustice as well as an imbalance. It should have
Probably not going to happen (Score:2)
It's a nice idea, and would be a test model for actual UBI that wouldn't (necessarily) depend on standard government tax/spend policies. That being said, the legal hurdles Congress would need to jump through to impose such a requirement on American companies certainly would be interesting. Also making it a percentage of profits rather than gross is just asking for trouble. So many dirty accounting tricks could derail such a plan from the get-go.
Re: (Score:2)
One of the issues with UBI is it contrasts with another societal goal. Fast forward 30 years, and say UBI is the way most people live. Then the best way to have a nice family income is to have as many children as possible (since each person gets paid more). That means more consumption, more pollution, more people. AI resulting in less income for people means people will have less children, and the population will shrink, IF those people do not find alternative work. The same things were said about the ATM m
Re: (Score:2)
Given el Bunko is claiming Trillion$ of dollars from his import value-added import taxes, most of which companies have picked up so far (they promise that will change in 2026), then that dimbulb can use those Trillion$ to fund AI-retaining or training for other jobs. After all, he's promoting AI everywhere, although that's mainly because he gains kickbacks from the industry.
C'mon el Bunko, do it for the country or is it that you are lying about the Trillion$? By the way, I hear that if you let AI loose on t