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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: 4, Interesting) by Non Sequor on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:40PM
Some of these predictions are undermined by pressure release valves, others are undermined by pressures he's ignoring.
One is thing to keep in mind is that it is entirely possible for significant numbers of households to transition from being two-income households to being one-income households. The labor participation rate may have peaked. Two-income households have a harder time moving to take advantage of new job opportunities, so there's some economic give and take as far as which is a more advantageous arrangement. These kinds of changes round out social changes in the types of work available.
Ramping up capacity through automation exacerbates resource shortages, which actually creates job opportunities related to obtaining more of or conserving a critical resource. This is actually also why Malthusians are wrong. You're always dealing with this year's resource constraints. This year's resource constraints are different from last year's and they will be different from next year's, but it's always going to be something.
Unskilled labor may be a much less scarce resource soon, but assuming responsibility for a task remains in finite supply. Human workflows implicitly include work which is done for the sake of maintaining chains of accountability. Verifying that a job is done properly, is itself work, and currently having a person on the hook for some adverse outcome is a kind of currency for this work.
I'm also kind of wondering if there's going to be another world war in my lifetime. I wonder if levels of botched international cooperation are starting to approach what they were at the end of the 19th century.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:15AM
Only slaves and indentured servants move to get a job.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:02PM
Only slaves and indentured servants move to get a job.
Pretty sure slaves and indentured servants are the only ones who can't move to get a new job.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:10AM
Maybe after that world war there will be some countries (white ones) where men can marry girl children?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:54AM
Don't fight wishful thinking with even more wishful thinking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:32PM
I'm confused about the requirement on "white ones". Are you saying that an African tribal warlord authorizing marriage to young girls within his tribe is worse than a white supremacist creating a whites-only commune where marriage to young girls is authorized?
Perhaps you're saying that a non-white community authorizing marriage to young girls is of no benefit to you because you are white and you wouldn't be invited?
Or are you saying that you don't find young non-white girls attractive, and can't imagine that anyone else would?
What reason would you give for why white racial purity is a prerequisite for marrying young girls to be acceptable? I'd think that those two things would be orthogonal; success in one shouldn't depend on success in the other.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:38PM
I wonder if levels of botched international cooperation
WWI was based around the Ottoman and Austrian empires dying and unless they were broken up evenly, whoever got more of the scraps would rule europe and/or the world, so it made sense to try and grab as much as possible or die trying. I'm still kinda surprised we didn't get a WWIII out of the collapse of Russia. We may yet get one out of the collapse of the USA. Arguably its not even how it was broken up, but just the fact that Black Sea ports were up for grabs meant a mandatory continent wide blood bath. "Failed States not Failing" would seem to be a pretty good strategy to avoid WWIII. God only knows what would have happened in Africa if we were doing just a little more imperialism during their famine eras a few decades ago, that could have been WWIII without foreign food aid if we also still officially did colonialism...
WWII boils down to you can 2015 style "Greece" the country of Greece and laugh at their suffering psycho politician style as they like so much to do, but if you try to "Greece" the Krupp Arms Works / Bavarian Motorwerkes or WTF it was all called, instead of the result being 2015 "Greece" you instead end up with tanks in Paris and Poland, eventually. So in the spirit of the doctor joke of not holding your arm up if it hurts to hold your arm up or whatever, just don't repeat doing something stupid. I still wonder if giving Greece a giant dose of shit in 2015, isn't going to "naturally" result in some sort of Alexander the Great re-enactment party in 2035. A suppose a simpler TLDR summary of WWII is you need to realize when you're playing a MAD game and then not play it. That failed pretty bad post WWI reparation treaties, and worked pretty well during the Cold War, so your mileage may vary.
Inevitably all empires and nations occasionally collapse and if whoever comes out on top, decides to F the USA over when its our turn to collapse, then we'll do the WWII thing and invade the world about one generation later. Its just human nature.