Giving Compass' Take:

• Southern California Grantmakers explores the issues behind technology displacing many workers in the job market, and how funders can help people adapt.

• The big takeaway is to invest in our children, ensuring future generations can meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing labor force. Areas of greatest interest are in STEM, computer training and vocational support.

• Another possible solution to consider: platform cooperatives.

Technology has always been a driving force of economic and social change, but those advances are often accompanied by severe disruption in the job market.

Even while California enjoys record-low levels of unemployment, readers responding to our California Influencer series express concerns for the future of the state’s changing economy.

But while most of the Influencers, a group of the state’s most respected experts in public policy, politics and government, acknowledged that jobs will be lost to automation, they are confident about California’s ability to successfully adapt to a technology-based economy.

“…One of the biggest economic challenges we face involves the jobs that are lost through advances in technology. (But) California is positioned to step up to this challenge and make it a friend, not a foe,” said former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, who emphasized opportunities in clean energy, water, and infrastructure. “…(W)ith our network of universities and high-tech centers we should be the ones creating the new technologies…”

“There is nothing new about new technology increasing labor productivity and the economy requiring fewer workers for the same output,” said Dorothy Rothrock, President of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association. “Education and workforce development curriculums need to be modernized to teach the skills that will keep workers fully employed.

Read the full article about what happens after robots take our jobs by Ana Victoria Cruz at Southern California Grantmakers.