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Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.
Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I [Vivek Wadhwa] expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15–20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.
I am not kidding. Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. By the late 2020s, self-driving cars will have proven to be so much safer than human-driven ones that we will be debating whether humans should be banned from public roads; and clean energies such as solar and wind will be able to provide for 100 percent of the planet's energy needs and cost a fraction of what fossil fuel– and nuclear-based generation does today.
In other words, every industry is disruptible by technology. Presumably, banking and punditry are forever?
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:26PM
Isn't it sort of already here? Among younger generations, establishing a proud career for a steady employer and having a large, expensive-to-support family is no longer a necessary path in life to avoid scandalizing one's fellow citizens. Having enough money to keep a social life going might be important, but I already do that by picking up odd jobs as a freelancer. None of my friends are particularly interested where that money spent on our activities together is coming from, so if suddenly its source were replaced with a baseline wage and I no longer did work, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Indeed. My wife once worked in an office where her workflow might have seemed complex and taken hours each day with the Windows apps that the company mandated, but it could have very easily been replaced with some Unix piped commands. Some people here might have read the The Two Cultures of Computing [pgbovine.net], a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?". It's funny if we might have to thank ignorance of four-decade-old computing technologies for the fact people still have jobs so far.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:39PM
Talking about Unix when everyone here loves Linux? You must be some kind of Troll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:47AM
There are places hiring people to print things out from one computer and then type it into a second...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:46PM
Some people here might have read the The Two Cultures of Computing [pgbovine.net], a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?"
There's an interesting parody of that, which I can't find by others might recognize, where the author analogizes with the building trades and points out the carpenter thinks nicely cut roof trusses are artistic and interesting and are his job, whereas the average end user likes housing bubble bullshit like stainless steel appliances and granite countertops, and this is CLI vs GUI argument from that essay.
Then it runs off the rails by mixing in a second analogy that most non-building trades people have no idea WTF is going on, so you end up with WTF pics getting circulated about comical construction projects done by amateurs that a real carpenter would do better in five minutes, but billy bob aint no carpenter and doesn't know what he doesn't know about carpentry, so he looks like an idiot to a carpenter or even a merely average craftsman.
And that is the root problem of MBA types trying to run a world being eaten by software, without understanding the basic concepts of software.