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.”

Give gold bugs their due. The yellow metal has been a light in the investing darkness. At a recent $3,406 per troy ounce, it’s up 30% this year, to the envy of stock, bond, and Bitcoin holders. Cash-flow purists will call this a flash in the pan, but they should look again. Over the past 20 years, SPDR Gold Shares , an exchange-traded fund, has surged 630%—85 points more than SPDR S&P 500 , which tracks shares of the biggest U.S. companies.

That isn’t supposed to happen. If businesses couldn’t be expected to outperform an unthinking metal over decades, shareholders would demand that they cease operations and hoard bullion instead. So, what’s going on? If this were gasoline or Nike shoes or Nvidia chips, we would look to supply versus demand. With immutable gold, nearly every ounce that has ever been found is still around somewhere, so price action is mostly about demand. That has been ravenous and broad since 2022.

That year, the U.S. and dozens of allies placed sweeping sanctions on Russia, including its largest banks, and China went on a bullion spree. Its buying has since cooled, but other central banks have stepped in. Perhaps this is unsurprising, in light of a decades-long diversification by finance ministers away from the U.S. dollar, which is down to 57% of foreign reserves from over 70% in 2000. But the recent uptick in gold stockpiling looks to JPMorgan Chase , the world’s largest bullion dealer, like a debasement trade. Investors are nervous about President Donald Trump’s tariffs, his browbeating of the Federal Reserve Chairman over interest rates, and blowout U.S. deficits.

Surging Demand

It isn’t just bankers. Demand among individuals for gold bars and coins has been surging, with some dealers experiencing sporadic shortages. Gold ETFs were bucking the trend, but flows there have turned solidly positive since last summer, including recently in China. All told, there is now an estimated $4 trillion worth of gold held by central banks, and $5 trillion by private investors. Calculated against $260 trillion for all financial assets, including stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives, that works out to a global gold portfolio allocation of 3.5%, a record.

What’s next? BofA Securities says that central banks have room for much more gold buying, and that China’s insurance companies are likely to dabble, too. RBC Capital Markets analyst Chris Louney says ETFs could drive demand growth from here, especially if angst reigns. “Gold is that asset of last resort…the part of the investing universe that investors really look for when they have a lot of questions elsewhere,” he says.

Russ Koesterich, a portfolio manager for BlackRock , a major player in ETFs including the iShares Gold Trust , says that gold has proven itself as a store of value, and deserves a 2% to 4% weighting for most investors. “I think it’s a tough call to say, ‘Would you chase it here?’ ” he says. “There have been some pullbacks. Those might represent a good opportunity, particularly for people who don’t have any exposure.”

Daniel Major, who covers materials stocks for UBS , points out that gold miners mostly haven’t wrapped themselves in glory in recent years with their dealmaking and asset management. As a result, a major index for the group is trading 30% below pre-Covid levels relative to earnings. UBS increased its 2026 gold price target by 23%, to $3,500 per troy ounce, before gold’s latest lurch higher. Many miners are producing at a cost of $1,200 to $2,000. Major has bumped up earnings estimates across his coverage. “I think we’re gonna see further upward revisions to consensus earnings,” he says. “This is what’s attractive about the gold space right now.”

Major’s favorite gold stocks are Barrick Gold , Newmont , and Endeavour Mining . More on those in a moment. We also have thoughts on how not to buy gold—and what not to expect it to do: Don’t count on it to keep beating stocks long term, or to provide precise short-term protection from inflation spikes and stock swoons. But first, a little history, chemistry, and rules of the yellow brick road.

Flesh of the Gods

The first gold coins of reliable weight and purity featured a lion and bull stamped on the face, and were minted at the order of King Croesus of Lydia, in modern-day Turkey, around 550 B.C. But by then, gold had been used as a show of riches for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians called gold the flesh of the gods, and laid the boy King Tutankhamen to rest in a gold coffin weighing 243 pounds. The Old Testament says that under King Solomon, gold in Jerusalem was as common as stone. Allow for literary license; silicon, an element in most stones, is 28.2% of the Earth’s crust, whereas gold is 0.0000004%.

Marco Polo described palace walls in China covered with gold. Mansa Musa I of Mali in West Africa, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, is said to have splashed so much gold around Cairo on the way that he crashed the local price by 20%, and it took 12 years to recover. To Montezuma, the Aztec king whose gold lured Cortés from Spain, the metal was called, as it still is by some in Central Mexico, teocuitlatl —literally, god excrement. Golden eras, gold medals, the Golden Rule, and golden calf—so deep is the historical association between gold and wealth, excellence, and vice that it seems to have a mystical hold on humanity. In fact, it’s more a matter of chemical inevitability.

Trade and savings are easier with money. Pick one for the job from the 118 known elements. Years ago on National Public Radio, Columbia University chemist Sanat Kumar used a process of elimination. Best to avoid elements that are cumbersome gases or liquids at room temperature. Stay away from the highly reactive columns I and II on the periodic table—we can’t have lithium ducats bursting into flame. Money should be rare, unlike zinc, which pennies are made from, but not too rare, unlike iridium, used for aircraft spark plugs. It shouldn’t be poisonous like arsenic or radioactive like radium—that rules out more elements than you might think. Of the handful that are left, eliminate any that weren’t discovered until recent centuries, or whose melting points were too high for early furnaces.

That leaves silver and gold. Silver tarnishes, but rarer, noble gold holds its luster. It is malleable enough to pound into sheets so thin that light will shine through. And, despite the best efforts of Isaac Newton and other would-be alchemists, it cannot be artificially created—profitably, anyhow. Technically, there is something called nuclear transmutation. If you can free a proton from mercury’s nucleus or insert one into platinum’s, you’ll end up with a nucleus with 79 protons, and that’s gold. Scientists did just that more than 80 years ago using mercury and a particle accelerator. But what little gold they produced was radioactive. If you think you can do better, you’ll likely need a nuclear reactor to prove it, but a large gold mine is one-fifth the cost, and we have to believe the permitting is easier.

We passed over copper due to commonness, but it has become too valuable to use for pennies. The 95% copper content of a pre-1982 penny is worth about three cents today. The equivalent amount of silver goes for $3.10, and gold, more than $320. But the three trade in different units. A pound of copper is up 17% this year, at $4.72. Silver and gold are typically quoted per troy ounce, a measure of hazy origin and clear tediousness, which is 9.7% heavier than a regular ounce. A troy ounce of silver is $32.70, up 13% this year.

Some Finer Points

Confused? This won’t help: The purity of investment gold, called its fineness, is measured in either parts per thousand or on a 24-point karat scale. A karat is different from a carat, the gemstone weight, but our friends in the U.K.—who adopted troy ounces in the 15th century—often spell both words with a “c.” Gold bricks like the ones central banks swap are called Good Delivery bars, and weigh 400 troy ounces, give or take, worth more than $1.3 million. If you buy a few, lift with your legs; each weighs a little over 27 regular pounds (as opposed to troy pounds, which, it pains us to note, are 12 troy ounces, not 16).

There are many options for smaller players, like Canadian Maple Leaf coins, which are 24-karat gold; South African Krugerrands, at 22 karats, and alloyed with copper for durability; and Gold American Eagles, 22 karats, with some silver and copper. Proof coins cost extra for their high polish, artistry, and limited runs, and may or may not become collectibles. Humbler-looking bullion coins are bought for their metal value. Prefer the latter if you aren’t a coin hobbyist. Avoid infomercials and stick with high-volume dealers. Even so, markups of 2% to 4% are common. Costco Wholesale , which sells gold in single troy ounce Swiss bars, charges 2%, but often runs out, and limits purchases to two bars per member a day. Factor in the cost of storage and insurance, too.

ETFs are more economical. For example, iShares Gold Trust costs 0.25%, not counting commissions. For long-term holders, as opposed to traders, there is a smaller fund called iShares Gold Trust Micro , which costs 0.09%.

Resist fleeing stocks for gold. The surprisingly long outperformance of gold is mostly a function of its recent run-up. From 1975 through last year, gold turned $1 invested into about $16, versus $348 for U.S. stocks. That starting point has a legal basis. President Franklin Roosevelt largely outlawed private gold ownership in 1933; President Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold in 1971; and President Gerald Ford made private ownership legal again at the end of 1974.

Gold has been a so-so inflation hedge over the past half-century, and at times a disappointing one. In 2022, when U.S. inflation peaked at a 40-year high of over 9%, the gold price went nowhere. The problem is that high inflation can prompt a sharp increase in interest rates. “If people can clip a 5% coupon on a T-bill, often they’d prefer to do that than have either a lump of metal or an ETF that doesn’t produce cash flow,” says BlackRock’s Koesterich.

Likewise, while gold has generally offset stock declines this year, it hasn’t always done so in the heat of the moment. Recall tariff “liberation day” early this month, which sent U.S. stocks down close to 11% in three days and pulled gold down nearly 5%. “This isn’t an uncommon scenario,” says RBC’s Louney. “When investors were losing elsewhere in their portfolio, gold was sold as well to cover those losses.”

Our top tip on how gold behaves is this: It doesn’t. People do the behaving, and they are appallingly unreliable. Use bonds as a stock market hedge. If they don’t work, fall back to patience. For inflation protection, think of assets that are a better match than gold for the goods and services that you buy every week. A diversified commodities fund has precious metals but also industrial ones, along with energy and grains. Treasury inflation-protected securities are explicitly linked to the consumer price index, which measures inflation for a theoretical individual whose buying patterns differ from your own, but are close enough.

Own a house. Stick with a workaday, reliable car. Yes, cars deteriorate. But so does nearly everything on a long enough timeline. Rely mostly on stocks, which represent businesses, which wouldn’t endure if they couldn’t turn raw inputs like commodities into something more profitable. There’s even a miner, Newmont, in the S&P 500.

The Case for Mining Stocks

Speaking of which, UBS’ Major recently upgraded both Canada’s Barrick and Denver-based Newmont from Neutral to Buy. “Both very much fall into that category of having a challenging recent track record,” he says. Newmont has lost 20% over the past three years while gold has gained 76%, which Major blames on difficult acquisitions and earnings shortfalls. Barrick, down 8%, has been in a dispute with Mali since 2023, when its government instituted a new mining code that gives it a greater share of profits. In recent days, authorities have shut the company’s offices in the capital city of Bamako over alleged nonpayment of taxes.

These are the sort of headaches that Krugerrands in a safe don’t produce. But Major calls expectations “adequately reset,” free cash flow attractive, and guidance achievable. Newmont, at 13 times next year’s earnings consensus, is selling assets, and Barrick, at 10 times, has healthy production growth.

Major also likes London-based, Toronto-listed Endeavour Mining , up 40% over the past three years and trading at nine times earnings, although he says it has “higher jurisdictional risk.” It is focused on West Africa, especially Burkina Faso, which had a coup d’état in 2022. You’d think the stock would be doing worse amid such political upheaval. Then again, Burkina Faso since 1966 has had eight coups, five coup attempts, and one street ousting of a president who tried to change the constitution to remain in power. That works out to an uprising every four years, on average.

Montezuma’s scatological name for gold might have been prescient, considering the sometimes-odious consequences for small countries that find it.