Indonesia prepares 3S strategy to help young workers adapt to AI - ANTARA News

TEXT START: The strategy, known as triple skilling or 3S, is aimed at strengthening workers’ skills as AI reshapes jobs and creates demand for new competencies, Deputy Minister of Manpower Afriansyah Noor said.

THE DISSECTION

This is a state transition-management memo disguised as workforce policy. It converts structural labor displacement into an individual skills deficiency. Upskilling, reskilling, and cross-skilling may help a minority enter AI-adjacent roles, but they do not restore aggregate demand for human labor. The policy trains workers to chase a moving target while AI and its owners determine the target’s economic value.

The 68 percent working-age population is treated as a demographic bonus. Under productive-participation collapse, it becomes a liability: a large labor supply is not an asset when firms increasingly need fewer workers. The article avoids the decisive question—who owns and controls the AI capital, and how its output is distributed?

THE CORE FALLACY

The central error is treating obsolescence as a skills mismatch. Under P1, AI’s cost and performance advantage expands across tasks and job bundles. A worker can acquire AI literacy, data analysis, adaptability, leadership, and cross-domain skills while the combined bundle itself becomes economically automatable.

The claim that critical thinking, work ethics, adaptability, and leadership can never be replaced confuses human possession with market indispensability. A capability may remain recognizably human yet cease to be necessary for production. Under P2, firms cannot preserve stable human-only domains at scale when competitors can automate them. Under P3, training cannot solve a shortage of jobs caused by automation.

Reskilling works only if new sectors absorb displaced workers at sufficient volume, wages, and duration. The article asserts that outcome; it provides no mechanism for it.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

• New sectors will create enough jobs to replace those destroyed, rather than becoming more automated themselves.
• Productivity gains will flow to wages instead of concentrating with AI-capital owners.
• National certification will translate into real bargaining power and durable employment.
• Workers have the time, money, access, and aptitude to retrain repeatedly as the target keeps moving.
• Flexible and freelance work is an adaptation rather than the conversion of employees into disposable contingent labor.
• Vocational institutions can update faster than the systems automating the skills they teach.
• A large working-age population remains economically valuable even when labor is no longer scarce.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Primary classification: transition management. Secondary classification: ideological anesthetic with a partial truth inside it.

The message gives the state a visible lever—curricula, training centers, instructors, and certificates—and gives workers an individual obligation: keep adapting. That shifts responsibility from the owners and controllers of AI capital onto workers allegedly failing to remain relevant. Inclusion and worker-protection measures may reduce local damage and create some Servitor pathways, but they do not address ownership, distribution, or the collapse of bargaining power.

The article is not pure fiction. Some workers will gain from better training, and a smaller cadre will become indispensable in AI deployment, verification, maintenance, and regulation. That limited truth is inflated into a solution for a structural break it cannot repair.

THE VERDICT

The 3S strategy is hospice care for the wage circuit marketed as a demographic dividend. It may produce more AI-literate Servitors and transition technicians. It cannot turn a labor-abundant population into Sovereigns, guarantee mass employment after automation reduces labor demand, or preserve post-WWII capitalism once the employment-to-wage-to-consumption circuit is severed. The policy delays recognition of P1–P3 while training workers to operate the machinery that makes most of them economically surplus.