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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...
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...