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Mike Rowe is sounding the alarm about the future of white and blue-collar jobs, and is urging young Americans to rethink their career choices due to threats from artificial intelligence.
The former star of the shows “How America Works” and “Dirty Jobs” sat down with Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade to discuss the outlook for the U.S. job market amid recent developments from President Donald Trump’s administration to invest in domestic energy and artificial intelligence.
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Trump visited Pittsburgh on July 15 to announce a $90 billion investment in data centers and other energy projects in Pennsylvania.
Rowe was also present at the event, dubbed the Energy and Investment Summit, at Carnegie Mellon University. He praised the efforts by the federal government and Pennsylvania leaders as “enormous.”
“The headlines have caught up to us in a way that is absolutely undeniable,” Rowe said during the interview. “This is an enormous play by Pennsylvania and [the two senators] [David] McCormick and [John] Fetterman, both of whom came together in a nonpartisan way to get behind this push.”
“I got invited simply to remind the crowd that creating jobs is very different from creating enthusiasm for those jobs.”
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The founder of MikeroweWORKS warned that artificial intelligence is not necessarily coming for jobs like coal miners and trade jobs, but instead coders and the technology industry may be at a high risk.
“We have, for the last 30 years, been elevating our white-collar portion of the workforce at the expense of the blue-collar portion,” Rowe said.
“We have been sort of intimating that the robots and the technology that is certainly on the horizon, if not already here, are coming for the blue-collar jobs. It’s turning out to be something quite the opposite- it’s the white-collar positions.”
Rowe added that writing and creative-focused jobs have unstable outlooks due to automation.
“These are looking very wobbly right now,” he said. “The AI is going to come for those [jobs].”
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However, Rowe cited the opportunity that the threat of white-collar positions brings to blue-collar ones. He expressed confidence that this resulting sea of change in the U.S. job market could bring about a “golden age” in trade positions.
“Short term, we are entering the golden age of plumbing, steam fitting, pipe fitting, welding, HVAC,” Rowe explained. “Those jobs are not going to be impacted by AI, and those are the jobs that are being created in Pennsylvania right now. And those are the opportunities that parents and guidance counselors ought to be zeroing in on.”
Rowe touted his foundation’s Work Ethic Scholarship program, which has seen an increase in applications over the last year, showcasing the national interest in young Americans for skilled trade jobs.
“My foundation is modest.” he said. “We’ve given away about $13 million in these Work Ethic scholarships and this year we have 10 times the applicants that we did a year before.”
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Despite the apparent enthusiasm from adolescents for blue-collar jobs, Rowe emphasized the need to fill the hundreds of thousands of open positions, and continuing efforts to advertise those positions are imperative to steadying U.S. manufacturing efforts.
“We don’t have an opportunity problem,” he explained. “And while we might have a skills gap, we also have a will gap. And if we don’t, if we don’t hit that thing head on, we’re going to just keep pushing the boulder up the hill, I’m afraid.”
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