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For years, we've been told the future belongs to tech jobs, coding boot camps and college degrees that leave young Americans saddled with debt. But while artificial intelligence is shaking up white-collar professions, there's one sector AI won't be replacing anytime soon: blue-collar skilled trades. Let's face it, when your septic system blows up are you the one who is going to clean up the mess? That's right -- while office workers worry about ChatGPT taking their jobs, the demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, and mechanics is skyrocketing. Companies are desperate for skilled workers, wages are soaring, and many of these careers offer six-figure salaries without the need for a four-year degree.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Carlos Contreras, AI and digital readiness director for Intel, about addressing the artificial intelligence skills gap with the AI for Workforce Program. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Karen Roby: We talk a lot about the tech skills gap. It seems like AI and cybersecurity are the two we tend to talk about a lot, that we need more people ready to fill those roles. But at Intel, you guys are building on a program to help change this and bridge the gap.

In opening yesterday's AI and the Work of the Future Congress, MIT Professor Daniela Rus presented diverging views of how artificial intelligence will impact jobs worldwide. By automating certain menial tasks, experts think AI is poised to improve human quality of life, boost profits, and create jobs, said Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Rus then quoted a World Economic Forum study estimating AI could help create 133 million new jobs worldwide over the next five years. Juxtaposing this optimistic view, however, she noted a recent survey that found about two-thirds of Americans believe machines will soon rob humans of their careers. The economists, who predict greater productivity and new jobs?

Individuals do not respond uniformly to treatments, events, or interventions. Sociologists routinely partition samples into subgroups to explore how the effects of treatments vary by covariates like race, gender, and socioeconomic status. In so doing, analysts determine the key subpopulations based on theoretical priors. Data-driven discoveries are also routine, yet the analyses by which sociologists typically go about them are problematic and seldom move us beyond our expectations, and biases, to explore new meaningful subgroups. Emerging machine learning methods allow researchers to explore sources of variation that they may not have previously considered, or envisaged. In this paper, we use causal trees to recursively partition the sample and uncover sources of treatment effect heterogeneity. We use honest estimation, splitting the sample into a training sample to grow the tree and an estimation sample to estimate leaf-specific effects. Assessing a central topic in the social inequality literature, college effects on wages, we compare what we learn from conventional approaches for exploring variation in effects to causal trees. Given our use of observational data, we use leaf-specific matching and sensitivity analyses to address confounding and offer interpretations of effects based on observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We encourage researchers to follow similar practices in their work on variation in sociological effects.

IBM is working to bring 1,800 jobs to France over the next two years in effort to bolster talent in artificial intelligence, IoT, cloud, and blockchain, CEO Ginni Rometty said at the Tech for Good Summit in Paris Wednesday. Also at the summit, the firm announced an expansion of its program for " new collar" skills training, IBM's initiative to train tech workers with specific high-level skills outside of a traditional four-year degree. The summit was hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, a press release noted. "President Macron is making a big bet, and a smart one, that AI is going to transform every job, every profession and every industry," Rometty said in the release. "At IBM, we share this belief and see evidence of it every day with Watson driving exponential impact here in France and around the world. That is why we are bringing 1,800 new jobs to France to meet growing demand for AI from our clients."

The assumption that a college education should take four years is baked into American culture. Colleges in the colonial days were founded on the premise of a four-year degree, a concept imported from Europe. Harvard University experimented with a three-year degree when it was founded in 1636, but the test was short-lived, and the four-year degree has been the standard ever since. We expect students to enter college at 18 and leave when they turn 22, and we worry about those who take a more circuitous route to graduation. But we need to reconsider that long-established, one-size-fits all model.