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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 VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:24PM
the part about basic necessities having negligible cost is fantasy
Binary thinking malfunction. It doesn't have to be zero or full cost. It can be so dang cheap its not worth charging.
My bachelor pad had "free" water, "free" heating... rolled into the rent because its too expensive to charge individually. Not freezing to death in winter and not dehydrating are rather basic needs. It turns out the insane cost of installing 28 separate meters and 28 separate monthly account billings just isn't worth in when the std deviation between us renters was incredibly low (Yes if you live in SFO there's a huge difference in heating an uninsulated apartment from 60 degrees to 65 or 75 degrees, but in the frozen north the relative difference between heating from -20 to 68 or -20 to 72 is a rounding error).
Now that I think back, ye olde student dorms had "everything" free but food! All the water you can drink, all the heat you want, infinite free electricity (well, technically we had 2 fifteen amp circuits)... This is pretty much the future. There were private dorms for the rich kids with "free" all you can eat food, which I never participated in, although I had a girlfriend living in an apartment dorm like that for a little while.
My point is at some point you round the cost down to nothing and file it under some other expense. Probably rent.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 30 2015, @01:55AM
The part that you're missing is that your bachelor pad wasn't free at all: you still had to pay rent. They just rolled everything into it because it's a better value that way, plus they probably use that as a selling point when competing against similar places; who wants to deal with paying a bunch of separate utility bills when you could just have one bill for the month?
Same thing goes for dorms. They aren't that cheap to live in these days. They just roll everything into one bill.
What you're talking about before is people living for free. There's no way to do that. Not without having some kind of welfare system, basic income, or similar. Real estate is a limited resource, as is energy. No one's going to give them away for free.