Does Iowa Hold the Key to America’s Automation Problem? -Like A Professional

Does Iowa Hold the Key to America’s Automation Problem?

Walking off the plane at the Des Moines airport, travelers are greeted by electronic billboards advertising Iowa’s capital as “America’s Cultivation Corridor” for “innovators, entrepreneurs, foodies”  and futuristic toilets with Automated seat covers.

It’s an unexpected vibe, and one Iowa is doubling down on, even in rural areas. Look to Jefferson, an hour’s drive from Des Moines. In September, technology consulting firm Pillar opened its first rural studio — it calls such mini-campuses Forges for tech job training in the city of fewer than 5,000 people.

If all goes to plan, the Forge will provide a pipeline from high school or community college to at least 30 high-paying jobs with Pillar and its parent company, Accenture, and potentially dozens more with Silicon Valley tech firms. Blue-chippers from App Academy to Microsoft and Facebook have funded scholarships for the training the program nearly 2,000 miles from their headquarters.

The project is about making sure we bring 21st-century jobs to rural America.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.

The Jefferson project is one possible answer to questions about the threat of automation to jobs that many Democratic presidential candidates are grappling with. In Utah, for example, the governor’s office and business groups are aiming at creating 25,000 new jobs in rural areas. Meanwhile, several companies focused on bringing Silicon Valley to Middle America have sprung up, such as venture firm Village Capital.

Job loss and AUTOMATION concerns have moved to the forefront of debates over the economy, partly because of the rise of Venture for America entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who has made it a core issue behind his call for universal basic income, and the echoing of those fears by candidates including South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Joe Biden.

“The project is about making sure we bring 21st-century jobs to rural America,” says Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, whose California district includes Silicon Valley and who helped broker the partnerships. “This is starting to tell the story about what can exist in smaller communities,” says Chris Deal, a Jefferson native who helped pitch Accenture on picking the old-school manufacturing city for its pilot location. Deal’s question is that of countless similar rural communities across the country.

“Can we go from a single company to creating a hub of technology? And really change this from a company to a movement?”

It’s a question piquing increased attention from the campaign trail on what answers may lie in overlooked places like Jefferson. The importance of the Jefferson initiative is accentuated by the fact that it’s happening in the first caucus state during a presidential election year.

“I love programs like that,” says Yang. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, also running for president, says they must be part of the solution: “We have to recognize that there are folks in this country who don’t even have a college degree, not a two-year degree, and we need to say.

‘What are we doing for them?’

The problem looms so largely in the contenders’ minds that frontrunner Biden dissected it for several minutes after an Iowa town hall. He worries about how Amazon has displaced traditional work in rural and urban places alike. His eulogizing extends to truck drivers, bank tellers, even journalists.

To Biden, the root of the problem is a change in “the ethic of corporate America” that focuses on short-term gains and benefiting stockholders, not on adding jobs or building the middle class. “These high-tech alternatives are really worth the investment. But the companies have to get engaged,” he adds.

Businesses benefit when they invest in non-traditional partnerships like these, says Linc Kroeger, who works for Pillar. Not only are they able to identify where competitors aren’t looking — think of a baseball team that scouts prospects in remote Caribbean islands — but they’re also able to train workers to more closely fit their needs. For Accenture, that means training them to be “multilingual” (i.e., able to work in multiple coding languages).

Because the training is tailored to a specific job, people are more likely to be hired in the end, but Yang cautions that programs like this can suffer from success rates as low as 15 percent. 

And the effectiveness of programs like these could hold cultural ramifications for the country. Many rural Americans must choose whether to stay in their community or move in search of a meaningful career path. 

But as broadband internet speeds become more accessible and more work can be done remotely, that choice could become unnecessary allowing people to live in a place like Jefferson and work for an Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook.

“There is talent here. But so many times, the opportunity isn’t here,” says Deal, who grew up nearby on his family’s century-old apple orchard. He recently moved back after his engineering firm created a flexible work-from-home program.

As politicians decry partisanship, this is a rare area of agreement. Khanna notes it’s just about the only thing that could unite himself, a California liberal, and a conservative like Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who also attended the Jefferson Forge opening. “That’s how we’re going to concretely stitch this country together,” Khanna says.

But the true test will be if such programs sustain the interest of politicians and business leaders long enough to make a difference. Four years from now, the presidential shuffle will begin again, and the same would-be White House types will descend on Iowa, even if the faces have changed. If programs like Jefferson’s wither on the vine, the next presidential crop may be asked why.

When it came time to start this app on Monday night, there was general embarrassment and disappointment. It’s related to the kind of confusion election safety experts had been warning about. But while much of this attention has been on international noise like Russia's campaign four years ago, the issues in Iowa highlighted how technological mistakes maybe even as serious. 

It also emphasized the danger of relying on voting technologies that vote integrity advocates think untrustworthy. Jones, the voting security advisor, and co-author of “ Broken votes, ” Got discouraged before the caucuses that Iowa Democratic party’s idea to distribute this unproven app within this high-stakes the event was dangerous and had been weakened by unreasonable silence and a lack of public confidence in its ability.

Some observers have expressed discontent at the strength that Iowa and New Hampshire make in the nominating process. One primary objection is that the sociology makeups of Iowa and New Hampshire are far from similar to the U.S. Writ big. 

Others complain that candidate is coerced to help individual special interests in Iowa and New Hampshire to gather support on the surface and do well in this government. Despite these concerns, the quadrennial journey of presidential candidates and the push corporation to the Hawkeye and Granite States has to turn into the part of the American Republican education. 

Yes, some mock this frenetic media coverage of the Sioux caucuses and New Hampshire primaries or insist that this operation should be restructured. But President Obama recently summed up the opinions of some when contemplating on Iowa's first-in-the-nation meeting: “ It seemed to me like the greatest representative of what philosophy should be. ”

The recent enterprise named the Iowa Advisory Council on Automated transport unites important participants from state and local authorities, private sector, policy and investigation to investigate “were from the state of Iowa perspective should we are going, ” Matulac said. This group is setting up subcommittees to concentrate on structure, communications, economic growth, and safety, she stated.

About the writers Hui-Hsien Feng is the postdoctoral research fellow at Iowa State University. She holds the MA at TESOL in the Ohio State University and a Ph.D. In Applied science and engineering at Iowa State University. Her research interests include computer-assisted language education, second-language academic work, automated work assessment, and computational sciences. Having @ iastate.edu, IA State establishment.

Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen is the assistant professor at the Applied science and engineering system at Iowa State University. He carries BSc and MSc degrees at computer science and technology from the Northern Federal University of Russia, and the Ph.D. At practical and computational sciences from Herzen government Peda- logical University. Before joining ISU in 2012, Evgeny spent more than six years running as the senior software operator in this Central Bank of the empire. His latest research interests exist in the intersection of applied sciences, psycholinguistics, and computational sciences. Evgeny @ iastate.edu, IA State establishment.

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