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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: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:28PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:28PM (#215501)

    There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.

    It mostly already is.

    Kids, retired people, students. All perfectly OK. Used to be socially acceptable to be a wife, then more specifically a mom, then a mom of young children... Still kinda OK somewheres in some peoples opinions. In the old days when I was a kid it was assumed college students like me had a part time grunt labor gig, which I did, which darn near paid my way, but illegals and student loans got rid of economic model so students mostly sit around and play video games now. Soldiers are kinda in between. When I wasn't deployed in the field we had nothing to do so we consumed donuts and coffee and sweat it out in PT and didn't really "do" anything. I suppose having soldiers do nothing is generally a net societal good and doing nothing while getting paid for it is a pretty good description of unemployment LOL.

    This is before we get wanna be jobs. In middle america, in most of the country, most part time minimum wage bartenders, waitresses, real estate agents, salespeople in general are liberal arts degree holders, education degree holders, etc. For them its the closest thing to a real job they'll ever have, even if it is just a grown-ups version of a teens McJob. HOWEVER in LA those jobs are held by wanna be actors, wanna be screenwriters, wanna be whatevers in the greater hollywood coprosperity sphere. I predict the growth of wannabe. "Well, yeah, technically I work for the county picking up roadkill corpses from the side of the road for three hours a week at minimum wage, but what I REALLY am is a high frequency trading algorithm designer, its just I'm starting out and trying to break into the industry, ya know, get my big break." You also see this with artists, particularly crafty touristy crap where they don't really try to make a living off it but they carve bird decoys in front of the TV all day and then try to sell them to tourists at the farmers market, but they're not really artists, or more accurately they're not really good, but they don't really care and it doesn't matter so its all good. The world of the future is gonna have a metric shit ton of painted plywood cutouts of a fat woman bending over in her garden for sale, probably online. I actually saw one of those once on a drive thru the country. "I'm an artist!" Uh sure.

    So I predict that socially everyone will be studying (for some small, slow, half way value of study) on free internet classes to become a computer programmer aka they're "students", or they'll have a wanna be trade or craft which they may or may not be any good at and may or may not spend any time at but it will be their identity none the less, and if they look young and glamorous enough they'll have part time minimum wage wannabe "press the flesh" jobs like receptionist at a hospital or whatever.

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