And nobody is obligated to make sure they aren’t walking off of a cliff.

Most people don’t share your confidence that we will replace senior engineers and I’d gobsmacked if we could. Just like the magical ‘automation’ can’t replace the people that actually make the physical things that the machines use to do their jobs, or fix the machines, no matter how good it gets. But the quantitatively-minded MBAs just kept kicking the can down the road and assumed it was someone else’s problem that the end of the road was approaching. It wasn’t their problem that there would be a problem in 30 years, and then it wasn’t their problem when it was 10 years, and now that we’re standing at the edge of a cliff, they’re realizing that it’s everybody’s problem and it’s going to be a hell of a lot more painful than if they’d had an extremely modest amount of foresight.

Now, US manufacturers are realizing that all of their skilled laborers are retiring or dying, and there isn’t enough time to transfer the more complex knowledge sets, like Tool and Die making, to a new set of apprentices. Many of these jobs are critical not only to national security, but also our country’s GDP because the things we do actually make are very useful, very specialized, and very expensive. Outsourcing jobs like making parts for fighter jets is really something we don’t want shipped overseas unless we want to see those parts pop up on aliexpress. If nobody is responsible for it and nobody wants to fund the government to fix it, but it is a real problem, it doesn’t take a genius to see the disconnect there.