Google To Spend $1 Billion To Head Off Mass Unemployment And Poverty In US

It’s the age of automation and whether they like it or not, companies are going to have to start replacing human workers with machines. This will ultimately lead to huge job losses and financial destabilization across every industry, at least for the short term. In an effort to at least minimize the damages, Google is set to spend $1 billion to prepare for the inevitable.

The money that the tech giant is setting aside is actually going to making sure that the people who will be displaced by automation will be able to land on their feet, Futurism reports. The initiative is called Grow with Google and the money is intended to go to several non-profit organizations that train workers for jobs that will still be relevant even after automation.

Goodwill already received $10 million from the budget, which then plans to use it for the Goodwill Digital Career Accelerator. This is a project intended to teach workers technological skills so that they can find work in an industry that is increasingly leaning towards technical skills.

There is also a program called the 50,000 Udacity Scholarship Challenge, which allows workers to receive technical training for free, Interesting Engineering reports. The program is open to both veteran and novice engineers since there is always room to learn.

In any case, this program and many others just like it is part of a growing response to the increasing threat that automation may pose to the majority of the modern workforce. It has simply become a fact of life that manual labor may soon become obsolete since they will be taken over by robots.

Jobs like those in construction, agriculture, and fast food are going the way of coal mining. In a few decades, finding a minimum wage job without any technical skills will be nearly impossible.