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posted by martyb on Friday April 07 2017, @12:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the night-shift-workers-may-disagree dept.

Coupland is talking backstage at Konica Minolta's Spotlight Live event on the future of work in Berlin this week where he was a star speaker. He says the collapse of the idea of a job for life means his generation, Generation X, and later ones think very differently about work than those born earlier. "They don't perceive [a job] as being a guarantee of long-term security – that's the profound difference, he says. "There was a point when the idea of the job for life disintegrated. Now no one has any expectation of lifetime employment."

Work as we know it is coming to an end, he told the audience in Berlin, as cloud-based technologies and ever-faster download speeds are making the office obsolete. Our working days are becoming interspersed with leisure and home activities. We will need to learn to adapt to a freeform schedule, which will present a psychological challenge to those who crave structure. But Coupland believes we should not mourn the loss of the traditional office routine.

"The nine to five is barbaric. I really believe that. I think one day we will look back at nine-to-five employment in a similar way to how we see child labour in the 19th century," he says. "The future will not have the nine till five. Instead, the whole day will be interspersed with other parts of your life. Scheduling will become freeform."

Nine-to-five sounds great to people whose employers expect them to work 80-hour weeks...


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @03:23PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @03:23PM (#490278)

    I think that you have good ideas.

    How long do you think it'll take humans to evolve out of the idea that violence is a legitimate way of negotiating a contract?

    My money's on about 100,000 years give or take. Do you think it could happen sooner or am I being wildly optimistic?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Friday April 07 2017, @04:49PM (4 children)

    I think that you have good ideas.

    How long do you think it'll take humans to evolve out of the idea that violence is a legitimate way of negotiating a contract?

    My money's on about 100,000 years give or take. Do you think it could happen sooner or am I being wildly optimistic?

    Violence has been declining for millenia. I'm currently reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature [wikipedia.org]. He discusses five "historical forces" for this decline in violence:

    The Leviathan – the rise of the modern nation-state and judiciary "with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force," which "can defuse the [individual] temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent ... self-serving biases."
            Commerce – the rise of "technological progress [allowing] the exchange of goods and services over longer distances and larger groups of trading partners," so that "other people become more valuable alive than dead" and "are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization."
            Feminization – increasing respect for "the interests and values of women."
            Cosmopolitanism – the rise of forces such as literacy, mobility, and mass media, which "can prompt people to take the perspectives of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them."
            The Escalator of Reason – an "intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs," which "can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to reframe violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won."[3]:xxvi
    [emphasis added]

    I recommend this book. It's cogent, well organized and bases its conclusions on actual data, not pseudo-libertarian fantasy [soylentnews.org].

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday April 07 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday April 07 2017, @07:40PM (#490474) Homepage

      " Feminization – increasing respect for "the interests and values of women."

      While that may be technically true, that men can no longer put mouthy women in their place reduces violence at the cost of weakening society. The family unit has been destroyed, and women would rather work than raise kids. This leads to them being miserable, insufferable cunts and provides an excuse for fifth-columnists to import third-world savages to further destabilize society and prop up the Ponzi scheme that is the global economy by turning all except the richest into debt slaves.

      We need to bring back the days of "Pow! Right in the kisser!"

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday April 07 2017, @07:54PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Friday April 07 2017, @07:54PM (#490487)

        You're so hard to mod, sometimes...

    • (Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Saturday April 08 2017, @07:21AM (1 child)

      by marcello_dl (2685) on Saturday April 08 2017, @07:21AM (#490742)

      This is a rationalization of the status quo, which completely forgets other forms or violence. Let this leviathan rule and you will need therapy just to stay alive, and forget about procreating naturally. Not that you will be able to complain about it without repercussions.

      Look at it from a coder perspective. Current system is intentional spaghetti code, and getting worse. Sane systems employ localism, modularity (independent cells can solve problems without needing the rest) protocols et al, and do not pollute their environment forcing units to acquire therapy just to stay on, which is gonna happen here. We are byzantine and we will probably end up in the same way, people will care less and less until the system dissolves. The difference is that the new system could employ robots who do not have de-motivation. Which means that the system will be dead but its zombie could be eternal.

      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday April 08 2017, @04:40PM

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday April 08 2017, @04:40PM (#490887) Homepage Journal

        This is a rationalization of the status quo, which completely forgets other forms or violence.

        To which other forms of violence are you referring?

        Let this leviathan rule and you will need therapy just to stay alive, and forget about procreating naturally. Not that you will be able to complain about it without repercussions.

        Therapy to stay alive? Are you referring to talk therapy [merriam-webster.com], medical therapy [merriam-webster.com], or something else?

        Natural procreation? Is that being restricted? What exactly do you mean by that?

        Given that PIV is always rape [wordpress.com], perhaps you're correct. (this is snark, for those of you who are vulnerable to Poe's Law)

        It's unclear (at least to me) what you're going on about. Perhaps you (or someone else who can decipher your incoherent blathering) could explain it to me?

        Look at it from a coder perspective.

        I'd prefer a car analogy.

        Current system is intentional spaghetti code, and getting worse. Sane systems employ localism, modularity (independent cells can solve problems without needing the rest) protocols et al, and do not pollute their environment forcing units to acquire therapy just to stay on, which is gonna happen here.

        I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that government is bad? Or that bad governance is bad? Or that we shouldn't have government at all?

        We are byzantine and we will probably end up in the same way, people will care less and less until the system dissolves. The difference is that the new system could employ robots who do not have de-motivation. Which means that the system will be dead but its zombie could be eternal.

        I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you have valid points to make, but are unable to elucidate them in English. Sadly, I am unable to identify those points. Perhaps that's a reading comprehension issue on my part?

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr