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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the dreaming dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:09AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:09AM (#215238)

    Indeed. Imagine if prices for everything were slashed to a mere 1% of current prices, but you have zero income. You can't afford anything and end up begging for pennies on the street. Those with jobs wouldn't be much better off, since there would be so much competition for each job that the employer can get away with paying a pittance. The only real winners are the CEO's.

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    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:49AM

    by ledow (5567) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:49AM (#215318) Homepage

    Indeed, however it's a fantastical situation.

    Just because of, say, complete energy abundance, it doesn't mean that we get prices dropping to the extent that it's realistic. Maybe for some items, but not for all, and certainly not the majority. Imagine electricity was free tomorrow. Yes, we'd all try to change to electric cars, which would go up in price for a brief surge until we all owned one. Yes, vast amounts of products would drop in price a little because manufacturing was cheaper. But still there are resources required aside from electricity and the scarcity and difficulty of collecting them means that they aren't going to suddenly dip in price without huge expenditure elsewhere (e.g. robotics to gather them). What's happened is that value has shifted from the stuff we can all have to the stuff that we all suddenly need at the same time but there's not enough to go around.

    Though it's nowhere near something that anyone can predict, the global product market is still disparate in its needs, such that unless *everything* becomes free, you're looking at generations of adjustment and then entirely new concepts providing the scarcity / luxury that society values. Hot-tubs will be in everyone's back yard, because the electricity is free, but you'll need to pay to upgrade your house electrics to cope with it all, the hot-tub industry will boom and then - well - every house has a hot-tub so the added value on your house price is zero. But now you can get product X which still only a few can afford, uses a rare material, etc. etc. etc.

    Virtually nothing is a one-component product. Computer chips have a scarcity of raw materials. If you can power a datacentre with a thousand times more power, you still need to cool it and the materials to do that aren't cheap.

    Though nobody can guarantee the balance will be permanent, actually it tends to work out pretty well. We all have star-trek communications devices that MUST talk to each other, we all have a multitude of cheap computing devices that were undreamt of even when we were kids, their prices have dropped significantly. But still they aren't free. And the services that run them, that's where the money has gone to. We have power to do almost anything in the home, including all having tools that a carpenter would have given his right-arm for a few generations ago. It just means we spend more time doing other things that are still difficult to do but we all have cheap, nice furniture at all while we do it.

    To be honest, in our children's lifetime, running out of oil is a real possibility. That's going to have more of a knock-on effect that can't be countered just by having, say, free electricity. It will destroy the plastics industry and use of plastics overnight, not to mention the various oils, lubricants, etc. Sure, we have *some* replacements not dependent on oil, but really it's going to hit much harder than just saying "That electricity bill? Tear it up!" (which some people are capable of doing today, given home solar, wind, etc.).

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:57AM

    by davester666 (155) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:57AM (#215322)

    But if you average everyone's salary together, it will be much higher than it is now.

    And you know, a rising tide floats all boats.

    Alas, there may be some holes in my analogy.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:03PM (#215450)

    Prices won't be slashed to 1%
    If you want to get an idea how a market will change when the goods that were scarce become common or even abundant; look no further than the music/book/video/... industry.