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Digital Revolution Will Kill Jobs, Inflame Social Unrest, Says Gartner
dcblogs writes "Gartner says new technologies are decreasing jobs. In the industrial revolution — and revolutions since — there was an invigoration of jobs. For instance, assembly lines for cars led to a vast infrastructure that could support mass production giving rise to everything from car dealers to road building and utility expansion into new suburban areas. But the "digital industrial revolution" is not following the same path. "What we're seeing is a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job," said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo. Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13. The analyst believes social unrest movements, similar to Occupy Wall Street, will emerge again by 2014 as the job creation problem deepens." Isn't "decline in the overall number of people required to do a job" precisely what assembly lines effect, even if some job categories as a result require fewer humans? We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong.
Jobs is already dead...
Just because you're 7 years from retirement and nobody wants to take you on doesn't mean that you shouldn't spend what's left of your life savings after the 2008 crisis to go to college and start anew as a Silverlight monkey!
No?
I also have a few predictions of stuff that will happen in 2014:
- Further improvements in production efficiency and robotics will increase unemployment to sky-high levels.
- The unemployed masses will be sitting on their asses with nothing to do, so they will start inventing new technologies, such as the Flying Car.
- Unemployed masses will be put to work to build factories that produce the Flying Car, and to manufacture the Flying Car.
- Robots will replace production line workers at the Flying Car factory.
- Mass unemployment will follow. The only ones who can afford a Flying Car are the assembly robots from the flying Car Factory.
- Humanity is screwed and robots are buzzing around in Flying Cars.
Anticipating this, I, for one, welcome our Robotic Flying Car Overlords.
There has never been a smooth transition. When the farms were mechanized we got major dislocations along with a vast increase in the wealth of America.
cf. "The Guilded Age".
http://www.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his1302/agrarian.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
What about: -> "guy-paid-to-feed-virtual-pets-on-facebook" ? I guess that would fall in the new upcoming "Virtual Subsistence Agriculture" category
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
Who needs 'post-scarcity utopia' when you can huddle behind the razor wire that surrounds your gated enclave and watch the battle between the barbarous criminal scum living in filth in the sacrifice zones and SecuriDyne kinetic pacification drones in real time, HD, 24/7 on the fear channel?
That, my friends, is Progress(tm)
The best part about Five Year Plans is that, like other strawman arguments, if they fail you can always make up another one.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Sshhhh! Don't let reality affect your ideology!
If only there was a way for employees to band together and convince employers of the importance of these issues...