Why were a lot of Midlanders out of work?

Choices:
A. people were going back to school to learn open source
B. OpenAdvantage was hiring all the workers
C. not enough information
D. industry was being automated and moved to Asia
industry was being automated and moved to Asia
Earlier this week, @naval (CEO and co-founder of AngelList) asked a question on Twitter:
"The challenge of the next decade is not Artificial Intelligence, but Human Intelligence. Can we retrain the workforce as knowledge workers?""
At the heart of his question is an interesting observation. As automation and artificial intelligence replaces manual jobs, how do we retrain people in the new knowledge economy where information handling and management is in high demand?
I thought I would share some experiences, observations, and recommendations based upon when I did this previously in my career.
Back in 2004 I was peddling my wares as a journalist, writing for the tech press. I was living in the West Midlands in England and heard about a new organization in nearby Birmingham called OpenAdvantage.
The premise was neat: open source was becoming a powerful force in technology and OpenAdvantage was set up to provide free consultancy for companies wanting to harness open source, as well as individuals who wanted to upskill in these new technologies. At the time in the West Midlands lots of industry was being automated and moved out to Asia, so lots of Midlanders were out of jobs and looking to retrain. This required, by definition, retaining the workforce as knowledge workers.
OpenAdvantage was funded by the UK government and the University of Central England, had a decent war chest, and was founded by Scott Thompon and Paul Cooper (the latter of which I met when he heckled me at a talk I gave at a Linux User Group once. 🙂 )
So, I went along to their launch event and wrote a piece about them. Shortly after, Paul and Scott invited me back over to the office and offered me a job there as an open source consultant.
I took the role, and this is where I cut my teeth on a lot of open source, community, and working with businesses. We had crazy targets to hit each month, so we ended up working with and training hundreds of organizations and individuals across a wide range of areas, and covering a wide berth of open source technology and approaches.