Afterword: On Education and Technological Unemployment

This chapter develops a summary assessment of the edited collection’s wide-ranging overview of labor and education issues in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It reviews the contributors’ critical analyses of what human learning is now, and their debates about what it must become as colleges, universities, and other learning environments undergo digital disruptions. As the staff and students of all educational institutions confront the deep changes intrinsic to these news waves of work reorganization and technological unemployment, the radical changes coming from autonomous systems, networked computing, robotic devices, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology tools cannot be downplayed. It concludes with thoughts about how human beings and nonhuman intelligent systems must develop new terms of coexistence within these new high-tech environments to respond effectively to the world’s most pressing problems at this historical juncture.