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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: 1) by tftp on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:54PM
How are people going to afford to pay these expenses without gainful employment?
Are they supposed to? Does anyone wonder today how the inhabitants of Brazilian favelas manage to pay for top notch medical services, best organic food and healthy living?
I fully agree that there will never be a society where anything material is free. Imagine such a society, and I immediately request to build me a planet-wide palace a mile wide. Even leaving alone the issue of materials, this palace is bound to intrude on other humans - what to do then? It appears that though materials and energy might be cheap enough, there are many resources that will remain rationed - and you will have to buy them. We have already seen such a transition when certain resources got too cheap to meter - like computing resources. The resource named "CPU time" is no longer rationed (unless you need a supercomputer,) but plenty more remain. Generally, anything that requires human labor will be rationed. Hell, the world government wants me to pay for the carbon dioxide exhaust of the power plant that powers my computer. That's an example of something that was free before, but artful scammers managed to make it into a product and force everyone to buy it!
Similarly, the author writes "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." Obviously the author didn't buy his own cell phone plan, as they can cost you a pretty penny. But besides, the cost of anything is not defined by the cost of production - it is defined by what the market will bear. As production of food and energy is necessarily monopolized by those "guilds," they can just dictate their prices. What will a city slicker do in protest - stop eating? Will he be planting his own potatoes in a flower pot? If a doctor's office is taxed through the gills, the doctor will charge $300 for a visit - and what will you then do if you need a prescription?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:07AM
No, we haven't, that's not possible. If CPU time were free, then Bitcoin would have no value. Bitcoin is the future, man, the future.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 30 2015, @02:06AM
There's two things which are not free and are not likely to ever be free: real estate and energy. We're certainly getting to the point where a lot of manufactured goods are extremely cheap because of efficiency and automation, but cheap is still not free, and making and transporting things requires energy. Even if we had free energy somehow (not likely), real estate is not free. Personally, I want a house in Hawaii near the beach and surrounded by jungle with no neighbors for miles around. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would like a place like that, but obviously there's only so much land available which meets those requirements, certainly not remotely enough for all the people who want it. With the human population continuing to grow, and the planet staying the same size, this situation isn't going to get much better; bigger/taller buildings help, but only so much. Most people don't want to live like sardines.