Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:01PM (#215382)

    Capitalism for all its faults just works

    ...until it completely falls on its face--which it does about every 80 years.
    Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.

    Screw the boom-and-bust cycle and the accompanying bailouts.

    abandon a working system for something new that hasn't even been tried yet.

    The new thing (and it isn't all that new) -has- been tried and it works GREAT.
    Mondragon: Successful Socialism since 1956 (aka Democracy in the workplace).
    Yes, there is an alternative to capitalism: Mondragon shows the way [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [rdwolff.com]

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:28PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:28PM (#215463) Journal

    ...until it completely falls on its face--which it does about every 80 years.

    It falls on its face more often than that. That's part of what makes it work so well. The instability removes inefficient parts of the economy.

    Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.

    The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.

    The new thing (and it isn't all that new) -has- been tried and it works GREAT. Mondragon: Successful Socialism since 1956 (aka Democracy in the workplace).

    Two things to note. First Mondragon is immersed in a capitalist society. Second, it falls flat on its face too as it did during the latest economic downturn. I can't yet tell whether that is more or less often than 80 years.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:49PM (#215511)

      Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.

      The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.

      I disagree, you seem to think that capitalism and fascism are mutually exclusive. Sadly they are not.
      The fascist capitalists are handing money to themselves to keep the status quo.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:49PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:49PM (#216058) Journal

        you seem to think that capitalism and fascism are mutually exclusive

        There's an obvious reason I disagree. What does private ownership of capital mean in a fascist society? Whatever the glorious leaders feel it means. A capitalist society protects private ownership. You don't have that in a fascist society.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:48PM (#215562)

      The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.

      Top lel. How can you be so sure that capitalism "just works" (too bad about those pesky externalities, time to invest in house boats) if it's not being implemented anywhere?

      Except maybe Somalia, where things like roads and police forces are maintained by rational self-interest. [youtube.com]

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:31AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 31 2015, @12:31AM (#216087) Journal

        How can you be so sure that capitalism "just works" (too bad about those pesky externalities, time to invest in house boats) if it's not being implemented anywhere?

        It's being implemented in plenty of places. The logical fail is to assume that a number of situations where you are precisely breaking capitalism is somehow a fault of capitalism. Let's look at the sentence that kicked this off.

        Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.

        Screw the boom-and-bust cycle and the accompanying bailouts.

        Fundamentally, the problem, "bail outs" described here is that people with power are taking stuff from people without power. That's a universal problem with all human societies, not just capitalist ones. The question shouldn't be whether capitalism has this problem, but whether the problem is worse than other approaches. I would argue that capitalism performs relatively good and has a number of advantages in addition.

        Second, the fundamental characteristic of capitalism is private ownership of capital. If I'm taxing your ability to acquire capital for the frivolous purpose of bailing out my fail buddies, then I'm breaking that characteristic. What other economic or political system is attacked on the basis that when you deliberately break it (sometimes with considerable effort), it doesn't work quite as well?

        It's also worth noting that most of the breaking has nothing to do with capitalism. For example, the majority of federal level spending is entitlements for the masses and the military. Eminent domain was a top down approach for public works which turned out to be very graft friendly. And there's a long history of anti-capitalist ploys used to keep people from getting drunk or high. All of these things provide opportunities for enrichment at public expense. Once again it is demonstrated that private companies which focus on a particular thing (be it making something useful or milking the public teat) succeed better than some top down managers who don't have a clue what they're doing. Good though not very capitalist intentions have morphed into crony capitalism and fascism.

        The complaints about capitalism are remarkable understated as well. After many decades of these anti-capitalist shenanigans in the US, we have slightly worse income and wealth equality? Maybe slightly worse employment rates? What other system can meet this sort of high expectation and still perform well?

        And unlike a lot of fantasy systems, capitalism is implemented to some degree everywhere with considerable success. We don't have to like China's or India's implementation of it to see that it has helped hundreds of millions in each country escape poverty. Capitalism has a powerful resilience and adaptability. Perhaps, we should fix what is broken rather than continue to break capitalism more while complaining that it's not working like it should.