Just A Few Reasons Why You Still Need To Work
from the damn-those-unintended-consequences dept
It seems that every few years, some "thinker" starts to extrapolate out on the trend of automation and comes to the conclusion that we're all going to lose our jobs. Of course, some think this is a good thing. If there's enough wealth to go around, then why not just chill out and sip beverages on the beach or something? Obviously, it's something of a pipe dream, but that doesn't stop the discussion from happening. A few years ago it was Marshall Brain and his worries about robots stealing your jobs. Last month, a consultant ripped off the same idea and renamed it "off-peopling" to make it sound new. Of course, they're all just different riffs off the same idea that keeps coming up. A decade ago, for example, it was Jeremy Rifkin telling us all that we were coming upon The End of Work. Of course, we're all still working, and some are finally hitting back and giving a number of detailed reasons why human jobs aren't going away even as we automate their jobs away. Basically, all of this automation simply opens up new opportunities for different types of jobs -- often in the surrounding ecosystem related to the automation. All of those machines need to be built and maintained, after all. At the same time, increased automation opens up new opportunities for support and services -- and, that's where plenty of jobs have been heading recently.
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eliminating jobs is bad
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Re: eliminating jobs is bad
Automation doesn't mean that the rich are going to make a fortune at the expense of the "working class". Automation will change the nature of haves and have nots. Previously, haves and have nots were determined by their parents or their race. Due to the information economy, future haves and have nots will be divided by education.
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Re: eliminating jobs is bad
Have you not been paying attention to the past 250 years of history? Technology, industrialization and automation have nothing to do with the same amount of productivity with fewer laborers, but about getting more productivity -- which tends to raise the overall standard of living across the board.
I agree that there isn't a one-to-one correspondance. If you look at history, though, it's the opposite of what you seem to be saying. Automation, technology and industrialization has created more jobs than it's taken away.
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Off-peopled or work-intensified
Rifkin suggests in one his books that culture has become a sort of product. So who knows, maybe a whole new field should open up - paid neighbors. Someday we may have paid neighbors, whose job it is to be friendly and build community, whose work serves to entertain and also guide a community's sense of the people in it and help them enjoy each other's company. I think that sort of thing should be done for free. Just wishful thinking, but it would certainly improve over the current function of the television and the internet.
In the near term, artists and designers are having their work intensified and streamlined by computer-reliant work methods, while the number of supporting-role people, and the number of employed artists and designers, continues to shrink or turn to starvation-salary contract employment, as has already happened to employed managers, salesmen, secretaries, authors/publishers, programmers, et cetera.
The Line56.com article characterizes information-work in general, and Microsoft technology in particular, as necessarily involving humans through the year 2050. If the author Demir Barlas takes a look at the Longhorn promo video of a Real Estate purchase, available on Microsoft's site, he'll see working examples of software sales, installation, and use requiring no meetings, support, or training.
In the case of a company wanting to move to a new server infrastructure, as in the Line56 article's example, a similar seamless process should allow companies to move to web-based software running on a server farm outside the company walls, allowing one provider company to do its work entirely across the web, with no on-site visits and with little or no live communication required of either party.
The provider's client may pay for ongoing support services, but the client will be paying for access to digitized information, rather than the option to talk to a knowledgeable person.
Microsoft's new XML programming model will streamline software development for companies like the one Barlas mentions. Generation 9 probably won't hire new people to keep up with Longhorn technology past whatever transition period the technology requires of them. Instead, the company will either replace or retrain its older employees. A few years out in Microsoft's new product cycle, and some Generation 9 employees may be layed off because the work-intensification of Microsoft's new development process requires fewer developers. I'm assuming that Generation 9 doesn't contract out for its development work.
I'm sure that the Linux community will move to an XML development as well, for its desktop software, something like XUL, but taken to the nth degree. What Microsoft doesn't do, the Linux community will.
By 2050, the AI technology base should be sufficiently developed to replace decision-making, communication-channel, and problem-solving jobs that were formerly too cheap to automate. What will be left is networked virtual companies, outsourcing every aspect of work that is outside their core competency, and actually employing very few people. Most information-work done throughout the network, work that people do right now, will be performed by machines.
Rifkin's predictions are right on, but 2005 is not 2050.
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Re: eliminating jobs is bad
Granted that this is low end farm labor. But in 10-15 years, farms above a certain size will automate putting millions out of work. The amount of jobs created to service these machines is maybe 1% of the jobs lost.
Eventually we will have fully automated car factories.
David M
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