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The Implications Of Knowledge Work
dsplat writes: "Business 2.0 has an article titled Mind Over Matter concerning the implications of "knowledge work" and its potential effects on the relationships between corporations, their employees and their customers. In many ways, it reads like a less strident version of the Cluetrain Manifesto. One telling quote is: 'Traditional capital was stuck in a company's bank account or investments. It could not walk away in disgust. Human capital has free will. It can walk out the door; traditional capital cannot.' This article is part of a larger series titled The 10 Driving Principles of the New Economy.
"
It may be true that human capital can walk, but nondisclosure agreements, incremental vesting and health benefits -- not to mention car payments, mortgages and diapers -- mean that walking often isn't simple. Smart businesses, ironically, may make themselves attractive to potential employees by ensuring that they're easy to leave, not just to start at. And even though this article is about "knowledge work," it bears repeating that only a small fraction of jobs fit that category.
There is definitely an old guard of managers around who are terrified of losing control over people's lives. I can't see this changing soon enough.
The company I work for (hence the AC posting) likes to think of itself as a leading IT consultancy when in fact it's a dinosaur of dated and inflexible working practices with managers that seem helpless to do anything but wait for the meteorite to hit. I think if any of them had a new idea they'd die of shock.
How many old style managers are in the habit of dropping by cluetrain.org?
So how is the message going to get through to these people? Bear in mind that in some companies resigning is taken as a sign that you couldn't take the pace.
Your optimism is unwarrented.
Perhaps in the short term you will win, but over time even you will get sick, get injured, or have a dependent that will.
I was hit by a car while crossing the street, in a crosswalk, with the signal. Some idiot decided to turn right on red and was too busy watching the oncoming cars for a gap in the traffic to bother looking in front of his nose to see if there were any pedestrians (this was in Chicago, where there is no shortage of pedestrians).
I got lucky. I landed on his hood, rather than going down beneath his tires. I got off with just a couple of bruises, but I still needed to go to the hospital, simply to make certain there were no internal injuries.
Gambling with your life to save a measly $168/month is your decision, but don't be surprised if the majority of the people reading your post consider you to be very penny wise and pound foolish financially, not to mention foolhardy in the extreme for taking such an unwarrented risk with your physical health.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Most of the kids, who think dating and partying are "in", were simply too busy dating and partying to respond to the poll.
Polls suck. Vote Hemos.
According to Teenage Research Unlimited, the percentage of teens who say that it is "in" to be online has jumped from 50 percent in 1994 to 74 percent in 1996 to 83 percent in 1998. It's now on par with dating and partying!
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but if 83% of teenagers think it's "in" to be online, and this puts it on a par with dating and partying, then 17% of teenagers must not think that dating and partying are "in."
17 fucking percent. So one in six teens thought partying and dating were "out".
What was their response? "Parties are sooooo early 90's man, everyone cool these days is into sitting at home polishing their gun collection."
Where did they find these kids? I'd expect partying and dating to show up at 99.44%. Did the sample group contain large numbers of amish teens?
--Shoeboy
Tell that to Balzac :)
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
In the old economy, workers attempted to achieve fulfillment through leisure. The worker was alienated from the means of production, which was owned and controlled by someone else. In the New Economy, fulfillment can be achieved through work, and the means of production shifts to the brain of the producer.
Does anyone else see this statement as a bunch of psuedo-Marxist corporate doublethink?
Now you don't need lesuire for fulfillment, because your job provides that. In other words, you should be glad you have a 60hr work week. It's more fulfilling than spending time with your kids.
And notice how it claims that workers now have more control over the "means of production", but says nothing about a change in ownership structure? Give people the illusion of control, and they won't demand it for real.
Before the Net, basic research was done in relative isolation until one had verifiable results, then one wrote a paper which was then submitted to a journal. The journal would then take several months while the submission was passed around to its panel members to be vetted. Finally the paper would be printed up in the journal and sent out by snail mail to subscribers. Only then would the knowledge enter the general knowledge base of the research world. The whole life cycle for the generation and re-incorporation of new ideas would take many months, even years.
With the Internet, ideas are shared daily, even hourly. This greatly accelerates the cycle of knowledge being reincorporated into the knowledge base. The ideas may be not be as well developed as they would be in a formal research paper submission, but since there are usually many other researchers in the world working along the same lines of inquiry, this early sharing of ideas-in-progress means that they can be peer reviewed as the research develops. Thus, erroneous insights can be dismissed much sooner, saving many months of wasted research time, and valuable insights are distributed to other researchers much sooner, enchancing the value of their own efforts.
I guess I didn't make it clear in my original post: it is not knowledge sharing itself that is new in the Internet. You are right in that it is an old phonemenon. What is different with the Internet is the way knowledge is shared. Ideas, when freed from physical means of transfer, travel much faster. Instead of being peer reviewed by a small group over months, there are now peered reviewed by a large group over days. ("To a large group of programmers, all bugs are shallow.") Also, the linking nature of the Internet fosters a culture where idea sharing becomes a natural course of action.
Ideology is for ideots.
I hear you: Someone said "It's getting better for smart people like us" and you're saying "It sure doesn't feel like it's getting better. We're still being screwed."
But you're conflating two things. I agree: they're out to get us, even if they don't mean to. But.
How people treat us -- social status -- is one thing. The affordances of a culture are another. Clearly these two things do not vary completely independently, but they do have some freedom and are distinct.
Social status is a function of values and emotion and squishy stuff like that. The affordances of a culture have objective bases. For instance, in a culture which relies upon breaking rock for vital goods, he who breaks rocks best has the greatest advantage. As much as that society might like to scorn rock-breakers, they are forced by objective reality to value rock-breakers. Those who cannot break rocks at all are left to scrabble for value.
Yes, they hate us. But -- and this is what Animats was saying -- we have finally arrived at a day in which we are those rock-breakers, and the rocks which need breaking can only be broken by about 25% of the population (I agree with that statistical guess for my own reasons).
What he's saying is that the game is increasingly rigged in our favor.
The social aspects will follow. Human hearts have immense inertia, but they will, in time, change.
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-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
There's no such thing as enough caffeine.. Must be off to get some more.. thanks Mr. D. Egberts! ;)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
"Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises :P"
:-) You don't even have to mention that you're considering leaving, and that seems to increase the "loyalty" feeling that many tech companies really seem desperate for. Being involved in the hiring process in the past, I can tell you that it's a rare jewel that we find someone who's stuck with the same company for a number of years, and I've seen many companies pay tons extra for that.
I've actually been at 2 companies (no names to keep my legal butt safe) where that has occurred to one level or another.
One company actually did go under (and they pretty much did treat their "knowledge workers" pretty poorly) due to the fact that they could not take even the short term effects of the "work slowdown" that some people participated in. This was a small company and was somewhat fragile.
The second (a much larger company) that had similar demands presented to them. They divided the angry workers by giving some what they wanted (quietly), and giving others just enough to stay then letting them go over time. They did a good job dividing them and sadly several of the workers who were let go had discussed the problem in public in a newspaper story. This had an adverse effect (since you don't see too many "tech strikes") where it did draw a number of other businesses around town's attention. They did eventually find good jobs, but it was quite difficult for them for a short period of time.
Discussing such imaginary possibilities can have some adverse effects. Regarding the second company I worked for, those who made the demands, and did get what they wanted were turned down for other positions in the company. The unstated reason was that due to their past threats to leave that the company, they were concerned that giving them senior positions would be a waste of $ in the case that they may decided to organize again and leave anyway. As unfortunate as it was to see some of them turned down for those jobs, it was hard to blame the company for being worried they'd do it again.
In both cases the workers presented they're case very confrontational. They pretty much said exactly what you stated and laid out their demands. You have to be careful about how you present such demands to an employer. I've found that presenting my "wishes" to my boss one on one often is much easier for the company and myself and less confrontational.
If your the guy your boss needs like you say, you can often do better making those requests on your own rather than with of few of the "dolts" that every office seems to have
The "Dianetics Scientology guy" wrote lots of science fiction. Your probably thinking of the same person.
- People being paid fifteen cents an hour are not going to be motivated, and motivation is the greater part of what drives knowledge workers.
- The people who have serious earnings potential are unlikely to wind up in prison; they generally have better things to do than robbery and the like, and even the zero-tolerance laws are more likely to cost them their cars than their freedom.
Neither of these are those were good points:- People can be highly motivated by threatened loss coupled with biological sustanence.
- People who have serious earnings potential are under a much greater risk of tax law imprisonment than are people with low earnings potential.
You're ignoring the very real trend toward criminalizing more of the population based on legislative bloat. You have to stop thinking in terms of imprisonment per se, when you are talking about the status of being a slave. Think in terms of loss of full citizenship, starting with being criminalized by a statutory corpus no one comprehends. Institutions, like animals under selective pressure, can become enormously creative when there are such huge incentives. Some additional trends that bear mentioning:Bankruptcy laws are being reformed to allow people with private debt to be more easily criminalized.
Use of mind altering drugs by prescription is now skyrocketing. In many schools, it is virtually mandatory for some students and their parents go along. I've personally seen this target the most gifted students who tend to have some behavioral problems for obvious reasons.
Non-prison sentences involving restrictions on movement via ankle tracers are already making many employees into inmates in their own jobs outside of the prison system.
Seastead this.
The same thing that chains an illegal immigrant to a particular job:
His employer can get him put in jail at the drop of a hat. Remember, you're a criminal. Who's going to believe your word against your employer's?
Seastead this.
The ankle bracelet allows you to be placed back in the work environment where your "employer" can watch over his investment more directly -- rather than in an expensive prison system. Your communications can be monitored and controlled as well as your movements so the likelihood of you even searching for work without your employer's knowledge is virutally nil. Regulations on a criminal under sentence are even more stringent than a criminal under parole or suspended sentence. If you think this won't be used to maximum economic advantage by employers who have the political savvy to benefit from the criminal justice system, I suggest your act of diagnosing my mental condition could, itself, be as easily characterized as a kind of religious belief in the essential goodness of mankind. This is a religious belief I do not happen to share with you.
Seastead this.
No I'm not, I'm postulating a continuation and expansion of the public-private partnerships that have given rise to businesses like Wakenhut. There is no conspiracy necessary to explain the emergence of such partnerships -- it is a direct result of contractual practices and the associated political incentives for porkbarrel. If you want to claim that everytime a smokefilled room's door closes and political deals are cut that is a "conspiracy", then I suppose you can call me a "conspiracy theorist".
Your idea that an existing noncriminalized employee would be reduced in status to a criminal so that his existing employer could exploit him is a paper tiger. I am unimpressed that you knocked it down. The classic job of "license plate manufacturing" wasn't supported by such transformations -- the source of workers were criminals and the "business" was the highly politically connected organization known as the government itself. Expand that to public-private partnerships and you can start to get some perspective.
Seastead this.
Control over a proprietary platform allows a company to control the value of all knowledge related to this platform. This means it can increase its own internal knowledge value and decrease the value of all other companies knowledge by constantly (and needlessly) modifying the platform. The knowledge of people inside the company, who actually design the modifications, will be more valuable then the knowledge of people outside who have to wait for them to be released, and would not be part of their design.
Open source, on the other hand, acts as an equalizer. It is difficult for any group to devalue the knowledge of other groups, since all developement is open. If any improvement to the code is made, it is true the developer will have an advantage; but given that even the design process is open, this advantage would be small.
So there's another incentive for companies to make proprietary software unstable. Besides the usual ones - cheaper and faster development, forcing users to upgrade often - there's a secondary one, devaluating the knowledge of all potentially competing developers.
Call it "knowledge inflation". The company creates more and more knowledge internally, just like a goverment prints more and more money. In both cases, the effect is similar - devaluating it, in effect imposing a tax on anyone without direct access to the printing press.
We all know how well Microsoft played this game... And many are worried that Sun will try to do the same with Java. In fact, every company trying to control a public standard is playing this game.
Sticking with open source is like sticking with a "gold standard" - there's no way someone can devalue it, barring producing a lot more gold - that is, a lot more open source code.
I wonder how far one can push this analogy. Do competeing platforms behave like different currencies? Can one compute an "interest rate
The key to COBRA crap is: You have 60 days from when you get the letter to elect coverage. Just FYI. My HR person (at the job I was leaving) told me how to scam this. I had to wait 90 days for health coverage at my new job (don't ask). She said "look, you won't get the letter for like three weeks anyway, then you have 60 days to decide. So if you get REALLY sick, you can elect COBRA coverage and pay the back premiums." I didn't and was about $300 ahead. NOTE IANAL.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
(I realize this is slightly off-topic, but what the hey...)
:)
The comments in the article body (for lack of a better word) mentioned health benefits as a reason for not leaving a company. The lack of universal health care coverage is one of the reasons I'm rather reluctant to get a job in the States. Sure, as long as you're working you're fine, but if you decide to quit, or are laid off, or are fired then you'd best not get sick. It's a rather scary proposition.
Granted, the diapers, the car payments, and the mortgage are still issues, but you can solve at least one of them by not reproducing, and the other once by cycling
Just my 2 cents.
I prefer ...Hacked I-openers capital ...slashdot karma capital ...low ICQ number capital ...and... plenty of Monty Python references
I guess he took his own advice.
Shaheen writes:
However, job security is a big thing among young programmers these days. Why pay some guy $70k a year, when we can pay the next college grad $50k for the same thing?
Some guy is paid $70K for being an experienced knowledge worker. And by that I mean experienced in the way things are done in the industry. They don't teach you that in college.
"Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place you come from?" - Agia
Well unfortunately, I think that the manual labor is going to start being pushed off into minorities, immigrants, and 3rd world countries. While this is a sort of bad view, it is the truth. While the wealth moves into the hands of the "knowledge workers" the grunt work will in turn get passed on to people not willing to adapt as quickly.
And this was going to be the rest of my point, but it would have made my comment go on a bit too long.
In the U.S., we have already "exported" alot of our manufacturing overseas - which does offer "help" to those up and coming but then doesn't give those here not interested in "computing" a chance.   This is part of what some have described as the "global economy", where you have "regions" of the world providing specific services for others.   Interestingly, in this scheme of things, the U.S. has steadily been identifying itself as the "information capitol of the world", and in fact, I just read an AP article this morning that indicated that the ceiling for the special "High Tech workers" visas (65,000, I believe) for bringing skilled technology foreigners into the U.S. has now been reached, and there is a push to have Congress increase the number.
Ironically, the U.S. is also considered the "bread basket of the world" as well, due to our amazing range of weather (artic to tropical) and open, flat land that is good for farming and grazing, yet the farms are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Quite an upheaval for us and scary to imagine what it will be like here in a hundred years...
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Yes, so? Neither did Service Merchandise; what they had was a warehouse where the order ticket was printed out and stuck in a box, somebody went and pulled the items and stuck them in the box, and it went down a conveyor to the pickup point. People did the picking, the computer did the inventory tracking and routing. That's playing to the strength of each.
:-)   *I* say, "be knowledgeable about information technology and how it should be used, but you shouldn't have to force yourself to BECOME a technology worker if that is not your expertise or desire".
Of course.   I had no argument about that!
The real advantage will come to the plumber when s/he (why be sexist?) can know that the parts for the job are in stock before completing the phone call with the customer. When the customer can look at pictures of, say, new faucets and have one all picked out before the net.plumber gets in the truck, and the net.plumber can go directly to the supply store which has what the customer wants, and have it already waiting when s/he gets there.
But what I'm saying is that we are already there!   Now...   Take this to the next, ie., what the article actually purports - I believe the authors indicated that there were something like 88 million "Net Gens" or whatever the heck they called them (kids between the ages of 2 and 22 or something).   The suggestion was that this group should (nearly all) focus on becoming "knowledge workers".   And maybe I interpret "knowledge workers" differently than others but to me "become a knowledge worker" means "get a job in the knowledge or information technology profession" or die!  
This is why we'll move to the electronic systems; they have so much potential for getting rid of useless waiting and pointless phone calls to the wrong people.
But we already HAVE electronics systems!   It seems that alot of the things being made "electronic" nowadays are a waste in that it often takes double or triple the time to process certain (not all) things electronically whereas a simple phone call would take care of it right away.   Perhaps that's due to poor design but it is a fact!   And it's interesting that you mention phone calls and on that note, I will point you to the almost useless voice menus - which are "electronic" by the way, running off some computer system.   And how many times have any of us pulled our hair out navigating web sites like Compaq's or Microsoft's????   Believe me, it's frustrating as hell - again due to poor design.   And along the line of phones - note that cellular phones have proliferated to almost "Star Trek" proportions!   I doubt that they'll be going away... hee hee.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Knowledge work is going to change everything, even those things we don't think of as knowledge work. It's going to be all over the place.
;-)
I don't think this is an issue.   Technology is ALREADY "all over the place", in everything we do.   That's the scary part.   We have become too dependent on it being there.   I have users who will literally sit at their desks with their hands folded, proceeding to whine that they "can't do their work" because their PC won't boot or they're getting and "Illegal Operation".   Yet a typewriter sits 10 feet away or the FAX machine is down the hall or a phone is sitting right there on their desk.   These are the same people who we had to drag kicking and screaming to use a computer in the first place!   It's really sad but true.
And regarding your "lowly" plumber, chances are he has some kind of desktop or maybe mini-network going in his business and may even keep his inventory in a spreadsheet.   However, someone needs to man the "stores" (or warehouses) where the parts he needs are stored.   Despite Sony's release of Aibo, we still don't have Rosie the Robot there to hand you your goods.   We're still very much "people-based" and will be so for some time.   Sure you have Japanese cars completely built by robots or places like Hershey's Foods, where not a human hand touches the product from start to finish, but these are still the unique exceptions to the rule.
Information technology is a tool to help us (supposedly) do our jobs more quickly and efficiently.   It hasn't yet become the be all, end all of our society.   Manual labor is still required to fix a riser pipe or install a garbage disposal (or even MANUFACTURE the garbage disposal).   Yes, the blue collar worker who doesn't get with the technology may fall by the wayside in managing his business but let's not forget the "underground economy" where money is exchanged for goods and services - no questions asked and no technology needed...   And as my mom always said, "pull the power plug and the technology is useless".
I think us "technology" or "knowledge workers" are the only ones who know how close we really are to being left completely helpless, more so than any user or customer who we may support.   I'm in no way "downing" technology.   I think this revolution has brought us gains in this society that are incalculable.   But I still urge caution and plain old common sense.
My paper and pencil contingency is ALWAYS within reach...  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
We seem to be living in a culture that rewards switching jobs more highly than staying with the same company. It seems to be much easier to find a higher salary by moving than it is to persuade your employer to pay you close to what you are worth according to the market.
Employers are reducing or dispensing with a lot of the intangiable rewards in jobs (pensions, insurance, etc.) that encouraged people to stay. This starts a vicious circle where the employee leaves and the cost to the employer of replacing them is at least partially recouped by cutting benefits etc. Some are even moving to using contractors (who have less benefits) for a number of permanent internal positions.
There is also the issue that employers will not train their staff because they claim they just change jobs. This leads to employers who rather than training internal staff up to required levels simply hire in the required expertise. This penalises employers who do train their people and also further alienates the existing staff.
This all happens further up the employment tree as well as companies headhunt their required skills. There was however an article somewhere recently that mentioned using headhunters can be a two-edged sword. Once an employee has worked the period necessary to earn the headhunter their fee then the headhunters have been known to start trying to place them all over again.
The fact that there is a new generation who have never experienced an employment environment where loyalty is adequately rewarded will simply exacerpate the situation.
In ten years or so there will probably be a very new employement model that is based more upon some kind of short-term contracts and tele-working (probably controlled/arbitrated by internet mechanisms) that will mean a lot of the knowledge style workers are not employees but resources that a company use when they need them (Website anyone?). I expect someone out there can tell me it already exists.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
Being a "knowledge worker" (I just consider myself a smart individual who doesn't mind being paid for thinking) is really the best part about being a geek.
:P
I had a real job (ie. not behind a register) while I was in high school - and that was because I knew computers really well (and was a fledgling programmer). I remember at one point, a lot of the people at the company got pink slips, and all interns would have to go. The coolest part was when my manager quickly called up HR and basically said "I NEED HIM, IDIOTS!" (referring to me).
Wouldn't that just make you feel GOOD? The best thing about being a knowledge worker is that you are needed for more than your typing ability. It is your ability to think analytically about a problem, and come up with a solution faster than the other guy.
However, job security is a big thing among young programmers these days. Why pay some guy $70k a year, when we can pay the next college grad $50k for the same thing? This is where being a good knowledge worker comes in (and it's why I would suggest to anyone thinking about not going to college to cash in on all the tech stuff now to think twice). Your job security is much better when you're the guy behind the desk who isn't just hammering out the code for some guy's design, but you're actually making the design decisions.
Being a knowledge worker should make everyone here feel better. And the better you are at thinking, the even better you should feel.
Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
One of the commoner cliches in articles like this is "Hire the young geeks, they've been using computers all their lives, and they really understand what's going on." Guess what? That's also true of many old geeks. Granted, it used to be a lot harder to get computer access -- which means that anybody who spent time geeking was extremely motivated.
I don't buy that software is like languages, learning it young changes your brain. I'm the daughter of a computer-science professor, and I was exposed to computers very young. When I went to college, my doors were blown off by some people who'd first encountered computers at college; they did datasuck faster than I did. What matters is speed of knowledge acquisition, not the age at which it was acquired.
I'm not advocating that young geeks are any less valuable than old geeks; just pointing out that we have different virtues to offer. The old geeks can say "Yes, we tried that back in 1981, and here's what went wrong then"; the young geeks can say "Let's try it this way in 2001, and see if we can do it now."
And, yes, old dogs can learn new tricks. I do it every day.
The Digital Age is not just an age of smart machines but of humans who, through networks, can combine their intelligence, knowledge, and creativity for breakthroughs in the creation of wealth and social development. Just as networking distributes and integrates computer processing - the network becomes the computer - so inter-networking should be able to distribute and integrate human intelligence to achieve a new form of organizational consciousness. The N-Gen may be the first generation to network intellect for problem solving and innovation...
This is something that I have been anticipating since I saw the Internet first begin to expand beyond the academic world and into the mainstream in the early 1990's. The early Internet created a networking of knowledge among researchers that spurred a rapid increase in the pace of technological development throughout the 70's and 80's and continues today. Now the same knowledge sharing enabled by the Internet has spread to the rest of the world.
For the kids growing up today, the Internet is not a novelty, it is their environment. Being immersed in this environment, they accept its inherent properties as natural and subconsciously apply them in their view of the rest of the world. Just as a webpage without hyperlinks is only of limited use, so too is unshared knowledge. In the view of the "N-Generation", everything is connected, and it is this interconnectedness that magnifies the power of any given thing.
This phenomenon of power through knowledge sharing should be quite recognizable to most readers of Slashdot. After all, where would Linux be today if Linus had not shared his ideas with other programmers, and other programmer had not in turn shared their ideas? The entire Open Source movement and its rise to prominence these days is directly attributable to same principle.
It should not come as any surprise then that knowledge sharing will have the same profound effect in changing the nature of business enterprises. As this new generation matures, you can expect to see the same forces being applied to solving social problems.
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster. It will be quite interesting.
Ideology is for ideots.
But the Net Generation has something far more ominous to face:
With the US prison population growing at phenomenal rates and more of the US population incarcerated than any other leading democracy, privatization of incarceration is increasingly attractive both as a cost-containment measure, and as political porkbarrel. With privatization comes the incentive to work the prisoners to pay for the costs of their incarceration. This comes at a time when we see a major shift in emphasis on "knowledge" as the source of productivity. Therefore after we see prisoners working to pay for the costs of their incarceration, we will next see a natural transition to forms of incarceration that may, increasingly, seem less like incarceration and more like slavery.
This will provide an environment in which employers can make investments in training and then recover those investments.
What? This is utterly outrageous dystopian fantasy?
Think again teenage ubergeek.
There are plenty of incentives to put your sweet young ass permanently in the corrections system.
Seastead this.
This is a new thing in history. Since the dawn of civilization, there have been mass jobs, where many people did similar work under close supervision. That's over. Almost any mass job can today be done better by machinery.
This trend started around 1950, when the first automated auto engine production lines were built. But it was another 25 years before the real squeeze started. In the '70s the auto companies started requiring a high school diploma for new hires. The printing trades (and their unions) were totally destroyed by computer typesetting. Today, manufacturing has only about 16% of the workforce. (Agriculture, over half the workforce a century ago, is below 3%).
Mass work is almost over. Even blue-collar work isn't mass work ay more. Watch a road crew or a building job. You'll see a large number of people, each doing something different. You might see one or two guys with shovels, but you'll very seldom see five; if the job is too big for a few guys, the heavy equipment moves in. Nobody wants bozos on those jobs, least of all the people working them. They're dangerous; the tools are too powerful.
This is the real reason we have homelessness. There's no role left for marginal people. The guy who gets drunk every payday and shows up with a hangover every Monday was tolerated in 1960 auto plants. Today, they're canned, and even the union doesn't object much.
It's a better world for smart people, yes. And there isn't going to be a revolution started by the losers, because they really are losers, not merely oppressed. But it has real problems.
We're gradually pushing up the minimum IQ needed to make a decent living. In 1950, someone with an 80 IQ but a decent work ethic could have a steady job, own a home, and raise a family. That's harder now. Entry level to the good life today is probably around 110 IQ. Here in Silicon Valley, it's probably around 130. Minimum.
That's the real problem with an economy based on "knowledge work". It's out of sync with human biology. Either we rework the economy, rework human biology (quite likely to be an option in a few decades) or see a big class divide. Those are the options.
Social Capital (ie influence, power)
;-)
Human Capital (ie people)
Information Capital (ie knowledge, etc)
Imaginary Capital (ie stocks, banknotes)
Real Capital (ie buildings, gold)
Your last statement, ie., "Real Capital", is what concerns me about this entire article and its thrust.
For some reason, the authors (and those who have written similar articles and books - and I've read a number of them) tend to create a fictional "[fill in the blank] generation" group, making the assumption that "[fill in the blank] generation" should "all" (in quotes) be expected to perform a certain [fill in the blank] job or forever fail to live comfortably or be a contributing member to society.   In this case, the over-emphasis (my opinion) on "Knowledge Capital" forgetting that somehow one needs to live and/or work in a house or work in an office (ie., Real Capital - eg., buildings).   Who, might I ask, will fix the plumbing in these said buildings?   Who will build more houses (or do we live in tents that we put up ourselves, drinking from the polluted rivers and disposing of our waste out in the streets?).   Who will string the CAT5 or fiber or manufacture the circuit board for your computer or even build the chair that you sit in?
It's nice to fantasize about "everyone" becoming a "knowledge worker" but lets get real folks.
True, the days of "big steel" and the so-called traditional "blue collar" worker are most likely over, at least here in the U.S.   However there is an infrastructure in place right now that MUST be maintained and the so-called "knowledge workers" wouldn't have a clue how to do it.   Voc Ed has been lambasted recently but there MUST a be layer of workers with the knowledge and skills in carpentry, plumbing, electrical wiring, masonary, etc., to maintain one of our primary requirements for survival - the shelter.
I have purposely left out all the other things we take for granted, like trash haulers, transportation workers, road-builders and such, figuring that those in fantasy-land might project that we "knowledge workers", our infrastructure crumbling around us (eg., no plumbing or electricity), would somehow still get by, sitting out on the street or in our yards staring at our solar-powered palmtops that are spewing our knowledged-based electrons at dying satellites (with broken navigational panels) in a decaying orbit ('cause no one knows how to fix them because remember, we're all "knowledge workers"), our end "products" going nowhere because the endpoint's wireless dish fell off the pole and no one knows how to set it back up again.
Let us all look at articles such as these as interesting information but information that will generally only apply to maybe 10% - 20% at most, of a given population.   I have read some variations of this article that were a little more realistic in that the authors projected that you'd have a good chunk of your population working as "knowledge workers" and the others as "service and support workers" for the "knowledge workers".   Keep this in mind.   Yes this view is harsh but step outside the idealism of it and think practicality.  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
"Imagine the impact of millions of fresh-thinking, energized youth -armed with the most powerful tools ever created-hitting the work force"
This happens every generation. I don't see what's new.
However, the perception of human resources as capital assets rather than an expense is very important. Those of us with even a limited remit on the commercial side of business know that expense and capital are two very different things. I know that if I could get management to think of people as a capital resource our engineering team at least would be all the better for it.
However, the article seems to think that the entire next generation will be these media-savvy uber-workers. They won't. There will be just as many people working in light industry for minimum wages, just as many short order chefs and just as many petrol station cashiers.
It's only a revolution of the yuppies.
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The hardest part of my job is trying to explain to management what I do. They all know it has something to do with computers, I'm usually the first person they call when problems occur. But the more arcane bits of my job are inexplicable to most of them. It's like magic. Even my direct supervisor is a little hazy about how I spend most of my day (no slashdot jokes please).
And from talking with friends and others, it's the same if not worse elsewhere.
So how can management quantify your value if they don't understand your function? Whose responsiblity is it to understand your function? How can we educate management about our functions?
But what did the author actually say that matters? Here's my breakdown of the article. Consider it the Cliff's Notes (tm) version:
That's my take on it. Now, if I may add my own observations:
Some final thoughts: marketing does not equal product. Hackers do not equal time wasted. Managers are not hackers. Garfield is not Odie. And so on.
Good luck. YMMV, as ever.
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Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.