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The technology revolution has delivered Google searches, Facebook friends, iPhone apps, Twitter rants and shopping for almost anything on Amazon, all in the past decade and a half.
What it hasn't delivered are many jobs. Google's Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had at the end of last year a total of 74,505 employees, about one-third fewer than Microsoft Corp. even though their combined stock-market value is twice as big. Photo-sharing service Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012.
Hiring in the computer and chip sectors dove after companies shifted hardware production outside the U.S., and the newest tech giants needed relatively few workers. The number of technology startups fizzled. Growth in productivity and wages slowed, and income inequality rose as machines replaced routine, low- and middle-income, human-powered work.
This outcome is a far cry from what many political leaders, tech entrepreneurs and economists predicted about a generation ago. In 2000, President Bill Clinton said in his last State of the Union address: "America will lead the world toward shared peace and prosperity and the far frontiers of science and technology." His economic team trumpeted "the ferment of rapid technological change" as one of the U.S. economy's "principal engines" of growth.
The gap between what the tech boom promised and then delivered is another source of the rumbling national discontent that powered the rise this year of political outsiders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
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Eventually there'll be only decent jobs for maybe 20% of the population: What economic system is needed for that??
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @11:15AM
I include myself in that demographic. I'm a software developer and there isn't really anything I do that couldn't be automated away given a hundred years of technology progression. What a future me would do for a job I really don't know.
Just become the polar opposite of an antisocial coder, overnight, and you'll do fine. The future belongs to social artists.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @12:40PM
So be a brown nosing social climbing twit is your solution? That is sad. =(
"Marketing douches will rule the world!"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 17 2016, @12:54PM
Just become the polar opposite
False dichotomy.
There are some positions titled "engineer" or "programmer" that aren't terribly creative. Just like there's plenty of jobs for un or anti creative artists (don't believe me? listen to some top 40 music ...).
Most engineer/programmer/scientist types are super creative. Probably on average more creative than the non-STEM people. There is a slight problem that to appreciate some of their creativity sometimes takes solving systems of differential equations rather than, I donno, merely eating gourmet food has a pretty low barrier to entry. I guess something like a moon rocket launch has enough prole level uneducated sensory phenomena to be appreciated if not understood as creativity or as essentially an example of performance art.
The rest is just "rah rah we're extroverts and the introverts can go F themselves" stuff that isn't very new or creative or interesting. With a side dish of "social skills" meaning accepting and repeating some behaviors that are dumb or immoral or psychopathic, but, crucially, are popular and/or profitable at the current time.