Pino Corrias: 600 thousand technicians are missing in Italy, and in the future he will do all artificial intelligence

This article by Pino Corrias is published in the number 22/23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 3 June 2025

Says the latest Censis that In Italy there are no workers, especially technical. Even 600 thousand in the next five years. 39 percent, graduates. The remaining 60 also not: welders, carpenters, mechanics. Companies who do not find workers for lack of adequate professional profiles are noticed. We notice every time we are looking for a plumber, an electrician, even a taxi driver.
Personally, the feeling of being surrounded by ghosts happens more and more often, People who should be seated in their workplace and instead are absent, indispensable.
This week I called to urgently change the timetable of a train, I always talked to recorded items, I digested all the options three times, up to the end of the artificial voice that said: “The operators are all busy, please try again later”. I stopped to make petrol at the automotive: the cards did not work, no gasoline in sight. I had to talk to my insurer who, like my accountant, has a formidable electron secretariat capable of absorbing messages and healthy with a bip. To make an online transfer, the line fell twice. When I succeeded, the bank charged me two euros of the commission, even if I did the work and the two euros I should have received, instead of giving them.
Not enough today’s desert, tomorrow’s awaits us. Also the Censis calculates that, by 2035, in Italy ten million workers in the tertiary sector and in automated factories will be replaced by artificial intelligence which will governs not only the production of material goods, but more and more the entire functioning of our lives. By prefiguring a daily life in which our needs, including our interpersonal relationships, the treatments to the person, will be increasingly paid and satisfied by digital machines and less and less by men and women in the flesh and blood.
Emptiness of relationships. And fatally empty of opportunities in the job market. Except in that intended for the maintenance and efficiency of the immense digital labyrinths, the only ones destined to expand, thanks to the computers which, according to scientists, will double their power every 18 months.
Is there a way out? The utopia of “working less to work everyone” becomes a necessity every day. One of the fathers of the economy, the British John Maynard Keynes, wrote in 1930 that his 2030 descendants would work no more than 15 hours a week.
In our country, much more recently, the sociologist Domenico De Masi supported it: “In post -war Italy the work represented half of life, we lived 300 thousand hours and worked for 150 thousand.
Today you live double and one tenth of the time is worked». If we will be capable of it is the path that awaits us, the only one able to divide the work that serves in increasingly smaller portions, Leaving that it is the relationships between people, desires, creativity that fill the much that remains.

Pino Corrias

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