How AI Could Keep Young Workers From Getting the Skills They Need

Whenever people talk about the dangers AI holds for the workforce, they usually have one thing in mind: technology stealing jobs. But artificial intelligence poses a much more subtle threat than that—one that will have consequences for business unless we address it.

Simply put, the way we’re handling AI is keeping young workers from learning skills.

For more than 12 years, I have been studying how work changes as a result of intelligent technologies like robots and AI. Across a number of industries, I’ve seen the same thing over and over: This new, sophisticated technology makes it easier for experts to do their jobs. Seasoned surgeons can operate more quickly and efficiently, for instance, when they use robots in the operating room.

But the efficiency comes at a cost. The technology allows experts to do more, independently, so they don’t need younger, less-experienced workers to help them out anymore—so those novices are left without mentors to teach them the skills they need to do their job. Looking at operating rooms again, it takes two people to perform most complex procedures with traditional tools. The senior surgeon generally provides “exposure” by retracting tissue while the resident does what most of us think of as surgery—incisions, suturing and so on. Residents are on task the entire time. Focused. Learning.

Now the residents mostly sit around during operations and watch veteran surgeons get the job done thanks to help from a robot. Limited work. Limited learning.

As learning opportunities like these are lost throughout more industries, the results could be profound for both individual workers and the economy. We are sacrificing skill building and human bonds of mentoring on the altar of productivity. No matter our role, tenure, occupation or industry, if we can’t collaborate with someone who knows more, we’re not going to learn effectively, and we won’t be able to keep up. And our organisations will struggle where they might otherwise race ahead—because workers won’t have the deep knowledge they need to innovate and step into senior roles.

Turning history on its head

We have decades of research showing that this situation is the opposite of what we want. We build skill by collaborating across the expert/novice divide, so novices get to see the work, help out at the edges and earn the privilege of doing more next time.

Now that mechanism is being lost. My observations, combined with primary data from other field researchers, show a destructive dynamic at work, across a range of industries. In industrial-process engineering, I have seen experts use software to do modeling on their own, instead of involving a junior engineer. In warehousing, I’ve watched area managers rely on dashboard analytics to understand staffing and process flows, instead of uncovering those things collaboratively with less-experienced line leads and workers.

My collaborator Callen Anthony at New York University found that junior investment-banking analysts were being separated from senior partners as those partners started to use algorithms to help create company valuations for mergers and acquisitions. Junior analysts—instead of collaborating with the senior partners as they had before—essentially just pulled data for the algorithms to use in their valuations.

The rationale for this arrangement was twofold: reduce errors by junior people in sophisticated work and maximise senior partners’ efficiency. Explaining the work to junior staffers pulled partners away from higher-level analysis.

This setup produced short-run productivity improvement, but it moved junior analysts away from challenging, complex work, making it harder for them to learn the entire valuation process and diminishing the firm’s future capability. Junior bankers become senior bankers, after all.

Less time at the table

One of the most striking examples of the widening skill gap is surgery. I observed hundreds of procedures at some of the top teaching hospitals in the country, where robots deeply reshaped how work was done. Surgery, as I said, used to take four hands; minimally invasive surgical robots can supply three, all controllable from a single console. They make things so much easier for surgeons that the million-dollar tools have become the de facto standard for many complex procedures.

Most important, robots make it possible for surgeons to perform operations solo, no residents needed. And, since residents are slower and make more mistakes than an experienced surgeon would, those surgeons are opting to cut residents out of the action. Before, residents might operate for four hours during a 4½-hour procedure. In my nationwide data, their robotic average time hovered in the 10- to 15-minute range. And residents got less operating time in 88% to 92% of cases.

In this situation, we end up with much-less-capable surgeons. My data shows that many newly minted surgeons struggle mightily when they get their first jobs—not just because they don’t have robotic skill, but because their failed quest to learn robotics took so much effort they lost key learning opportunities in other procedures and practice areas, from ureteroscopy to kidney stones to vasectomies, that they would be expected to handle in most new surgical jobs.

The long-term loss

The consequences of poor training go beyond day-to-day competence. Consider what happens to the culture of a hospital when it loses healthy expert/novice collaborations. Less teaching and learning, to be sure, but also more-limited career advancement as experts advocate less for trainees. What about hospitals’ ability to innovate in surgical practices? Limits there, too, as discoveries made by colleagues get tamped down by increasingly focused, efficient, expert-driven surgical performance. The ability to service skyrocketing surgical demand? In the short run, you serve more patients, but in the medium term you scramble to keep up as the pool of new talent dwindles.

Of course, different organisations, industries and professions in different places will feel the pinch on different time scales. They will also compensate in different ways. But in general, organisations will not sense the problem directly: Instead, they will incrementally accumulate a larger cost base—in areas such as (re)training and reduced billable or applied time—and build a bureaucracy to manage this skills gap. At law firms, new attorneys might take longer to ramp up to normal caseloads, while senior attorneys would have to spend more non billable time to handhold them.

Now imagine the consequences of similar skills gap across all types of companies, throughout the economy. Without a firm, immediate correction, this is what we can expect. This is our trillion-dollar skills problem.

A way forward?

Solving the problem is vital, but how should we do it? My collaborator and I found evidence of one approach that can work.

Remember, the problem right now is that senior workers are learning new technologies, such as robotic surgery, that make junior workers unnecessary. In our research, though, we found cases where junior and senior workers teamed up to learn about new technologies together .

By working closely with seniors in this way, the juniors didn’t just learn about the new technologies, they ended up collaborating with seniors on other aspects of the job. Since the older and younger workers were figuring out how the tech worked, they also needed to figure out how to integrate it into vital day-to-day tasks. So, the novices got to see firsthand how those jobs were done while performing actual work.

For instance, in my research, I saw some residents and senior urologists team up to learn robotic techniques in live surgical procedures. In those cases, the residents got much more actual hands-on operating time than residents who mostly just watched robotic procedures—10 times more. And the quality of that time was far better: Expert and novice were jointly figuring out how to use the tech, just as they had a patient on the table.

Granted, this process isn’t easy. In our research, we found that these collaborations often failed. But when they did work, they were powerfully effective. We need more companies to take the chance and implement this strategy, to figure out how to make it most effective and serve as examples.

It will not only help close the skills gap, it will give old and new workers a new sense of purpose on the job—through strengthened relationships. Research shows very clearly that we get motivation for our work when it builds trust and respect with those who share our values. Progressing to more competence therefore involves questions of the heart, like, “Have I earned this expert’s trust and respect?” or “Does this novice look up to me?”

We often treat these issues as unconnected with hard-nosed skill and results, when they are a core part of why we try at all in the first place. They are the animating force for the journey.

Matthew Beane is an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “ The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines.”

KYIV, Ukraine—Beyond the bombs and gunfire of Russia’s war in Ukraine , a parallel economic war is raging.

Its front line is on occupied Ukrainian farmlands, from which Russia and its partners have sold almost $1 billion in stolen grain on a burgeoning black market.

Moscow’s forces in Ukraine since 2022 have occupied some of Europe’s most fertile farmland. The occupiers have either seized harvests or bought them cheaply, often forcibly.

The business involves a wide network of clients who benefit from Moscow’s wartime patronage system, including a Russian shipyard equipping the invasion, a company affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a Crimean businessman who trades with Syria and Israel. Another company sells through the United Arab Emirates.

Trading the looted Ukrainian agricultural products keeps Russia’s allies funded and loyal to Moscow even as it faces mounting economic pressure , offering a sort of off-balance-sheet vehicle financing Kremlin objectives.

The Kremlin didn’t return requests for comment on its exports of Ukrainian crops.

“It’s like the war is feeding itself,” said Pascal Turlan, legal director at rights organization Project Expedite Justice, which is helping Ukrainian prosecutors investigate grain theft. “The illicit trade brings revenue to a Kremlin-sponsored patronage system, which in turn helps the conflict and the occupation to continue.”

The exact commercial value of Russia’s pilferage is difficult to determine amid the war’s chaos and Moscow’s subterfuge, but it is large. Since 2022, the operation has directly shipped at least 4 million tons of grain and other produce from occupied Ukraine to international markets, generating revenue of $800 million, said Markiyan Dmytrasevych, Ukraine’s deputy agriculture minister.

Much more has been exported by land or small ships, according to Ukrainian nonprofit organization Texty, which estimates the total value of grain taken by Russia in occupied territories could be as high as $6.4 billion.

The patronage take many forms. Three bulk vessels that export large volumes of illicit grain are owned through a chain of corporate entities by Russia’s state-run United Shipbuilding Corp., which also produced warships used to shell Ukrainian cities, according to the U.S. government.

A Russian company that exclusively sold grain from the occupied region of Zaporizhzhia donated 10 million rubles, or $111,000, to a battalion fighting in the province, according to a document obtained by KibOrg News, a Ukrainian project that documents Russian economic-looting activities in the occupied territories.

Moscow is also attacking Ukraine’s own grain exports. Late Wednesday, a Russian missile struck at a ship that was carrying Ukrainian wheat just after it had left a Black Sea port for Egypt, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said on his Telegram channel.

From farm to sea
Russia’s illicit agricultural trade begins on Ukrainian farms. Moscow’s forces either compel farmers to sell their crops at below-market prices or steal them, sometimes at gunpoint.

Bohdan Katerenyak, the manager of a silo in Kherson, a southern Ukrainian province conquered by Russia at the beginning of the war, said he was at work in August 2022 when men with machine guns, clad in balaclavas, entered his office.

“We have an order to take over,” one told him in a Chechen accent, handing him an identification card from the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service, Katerenyak said. A few days later, another man, also claiming to be an FSB agent, arrived and impounded the facility’s grain.

“They are bandits,” Katerenyak said of the men. Fearful, he fled to Ukrainian-controlled territory and later learned the silos had been emptied.

From farms like Katerenyak’s, produce is shipped by truck and rail to ports along the Black Sea, some on occupied Ukrainian territory.

Russian authorities say that in the first half of this year they sent 15 ships carrying 81,000 tons of wheat to Turkey from Mariupol, another city conquered during the war.

Turkey bans ships from occupied Ukrainian terminals and cooperates with Kyiv to block illicit trade, the country’s foreign-affairs officials said.

Separately, Ukrainian prosecutor Ihor Ponochovniy in June started tracking a Turkish-owned ship, the Usko MFU, which he suspected had carried stolen grain last year from the Crimean port of Sevastopol . Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022 linked it with occupied Kherson.

Ukraine’s border force in June told Ponochovniy the Usko MFU had entered Ukrainian waters. He issued a search warrant and police boarded it. Onboard they found records showing it had left Sevastopol last November for Turkey carrying 2,100 tons of crushed sunflower seeds and brown wheat potentially worth half a million dollars.

Investigators said they found onboard a message from the ship’s managers to the captain instructing him to conceal the cargo’s Crimean origin. Ukraine’s border force in July seized the Usko MFU.

The ship’s owner, USKO Shipping Management, didn’t respond to a request for comment. A lawyer representing the vessel’s captain declined to comment.

Mikhail Ganaga, a former professional wrestler and the son of a district governor in Crimea, is among a select group of collaborators who have profited from the grain theft.

Ganaga controls Agro-Fregat LLC, which delivers grain harvested in occupied territories and has shipped grain to Israel and two of its foes, Syria and Iran, according to trade and shipping records and Ganaga himself. Ganaga and Agro-Fregat didn’t return requests for comment.

Pressure to halt shipments

Ukraine is applying diplomatic pressure on importing countries, with some success. In the past two years, Egypt, Israel and Lebanon either canceled loadings or stopped buying grain cargoes after Ukrainian diplomats told them they had departed from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine , according to Ukrainian officials.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhiy said that Lebanon shifted to Ukrainian grain. Egypt has refused some grain shipments that originated in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

Russian allies Iran and Syria have said they won’t abide by sanctions. Iran has supplied the Kremlin deadly weaponry that enhanced Russia’s ability to hit military and civilian targets. This month, Tehran started to supply ballistic missiles to the Kremlin. Iranian politicians said they were in exchange for Russian grain.

Tehran buys barley in Crimea for $140 a ton, a 34% discount from market prices, said Kateryna Yaresko, an analyst at SeaKrime, a nonprofit project in Kyiv that tracks illegal shipments from Crimea and provides information to the Ukrainian authorities.

Traders in Russian-occupied territories are building ties with Tehran’s hard-line circles. Igor Rudetsky, a manager at a grain terminal in occupied Crimea, last year posted on his social-media accounts pictures of himself meeting representatives of Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, which is sanctioned by the U.S. for shipping weapons on behalf of Iran’s military and nuclear technologies.

Rudetsky, according to his posts, also visited Pars Holding, an agricultural company that is part of a foundation controlled by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei . Rudetsky said by text message that he spoke to the companies as part of an international marketing campaign that also included China, India and Africa, though he says he doesn’t sell produce himself.

Rudetsky said grain exports from Russia aren’t restricted by international sanctions and that he bought the port “for real money” in a deal that was “legally impeccable.”

Russia deems Crimea its territory but other countries don’t and consider any exports from it illegal.

Yemen is a new market for Crimean exports. In June, a Russian state-controlled vessel, the Zafar, delivered grains to al-Salif, a port held by the Iranian-backed Houthi faction in Yemen, according to shipping and corporate records.

As Kyiv cracks down, exporters are adopting increasingly complex evasion tactics such as transferring grain to Russia and mixing it with legitimate products before reselling it on international markets. Ukrainian authorities are struggling to keep up.

“We need more people,” said Ponochovniy, the prosecutor.

Ukrainian prosecutors in Kharkiv are probing a trader that it suspects stole grain and resold cargoes to an Emirati company. Helios Plus drew prosecutors’ attention after it removed all 700 tons of grain left at a bread factory flour mill in the nearby town of Kupyansk when Russia seized it in August 2022.

Helios Plus didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The company in 2015 started selling grain out of areas of eastern Ukraine that had come under control of Russian-backed separatists, according to Russian records viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The records were obtained in an investigation by Project Expedite Justice.

The documents indicate Helios Plus took a large volume of grain from other occupied territories in the past two years. It then sold the grain to buyers in Turkey, the U.A.E. and as far as Costa Rica, according to customs declarations.