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Gates Warns of Software Replacing People; Greenspan Says H-1Bs Fix Inequity
dcblogs writes "Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan, in separate forums, offered outlooks and prescriptions for fixing jobs and income. Gates is concerned that graduates of U.S. secondary schools may not be able stay ahead of software automation. 'These things are coming fast,' said Gates, in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute 'Twenty years from now labor demand for a lots of skill sets will be substantially lower, and I don't think people have that in their mental model.' Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap. If the program were expanded, income wouldn't necessarily go down much, but it would go down enough to make an impact. Income inequality is a relative concept, he argued. People who are absolutely at the top of the scale in 1925, for instance, would be getting food stamps today, said Greenspan. 'You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down.'"
It is NOT a problem in the current model at all. It is a problem only for those that are not willing to change or evolve their skills. Skill sets required change, some new ones will be required and many old ones will become less relevant. In a recent training course I was at there were a whole heap of infrastructure people trying to improve there development skillset (surprised me how many actually), these are people that can see the freight train coming and are altering there skills appropriately. Many more will simply find themselves out of work and wonder "what the fuck just happened?" and this is just in the IT space, every other work environment has the same situation. Evolve or Die!