Tags
Automation, Capitalism, Labour, Minimum income, TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT, The corporate ladder.
Most computer scientists are busy making the technology happen rather than asking what the results will be,”
Tomorrow’s organizations may bear little resemblance to those we are familiar with.
A lot of things that were routine are becoming automated.
Technological advancement is rampant in every walk of life.
We’er seeing this with automated sales calls and administrative work that can all be done with software. For example Algorithms can easily identify safe borrowers — followed by receptionists, paralegals, retails salespeople and taxi drivers.
If that does not get the alarm bells ringing the first synthetic chromosome for a creature with complex cells has being designed on a computer and made from scratch in a laboratory. The day of designer plants an animal is not far off.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have allowed robots to climb the corporate ladder.
So what do we have?
On one hand, you have the neoclassical economists saying some jobs will be destroyed, but others will be created, so there’s nothing to worry about.
On the other hand, you have what some people are calling the neo-luddites, who believe there’s something different about this technology.
How high can they go? Is there a corner office in R2-D2’s future?
Within 30 years, computers and machines will replace a fully half of the North American workforce and as demographic shifts, globalization and technology replace traditional work practices 47% of the World’s jobs will be automated in the next twenty odd years.
So what happens when labor is not human any longer but automated, as more and more jobs requiring medium levels of skill are automated away.
What going to happen is economic growth will accrue to an ever increasingly smaller group of highly payed people, with automation becoming self-perpetuating while skills are lost forever to invisible robots.
We probable see a new underclass with new means of social thought that might well see the demise of Capitalism itself.
This however is highly unlikely, because automation is rapidly becoming an integral part of the system. What we now call work has morphed to accommodate automation advancement.
Capitalism will be over the moon. As the future of labour in the Capitalist world has always being to create profit by extracting what’s call value from workers. Another words paying the worker less than what their time is worth and gaining the difference as profit. As John Tomlinson said in his book The Culture of Speed, The Coming of Immediacy, no idiom captures the spirit of Capitalism better than –
” Time is money”
So it stands to reason that if machines are producing stuff around the clock the underclasses will have to find new jobs that will offer no stability, less satisfaction, and no security of a standard of living.
At the very moment there are millions of part-time no hours contract workers called Parecariat ( These are workers who are no longer definable by fixed rules relative to the labor relation, to salary,to the length of the working day.
Capital no longer recruits people , but buys packets of time. This time is fractalized, that is reduced to minimal fragments that can be reassembled so to ensure minimum wages or salary.
The working day is now all day every day. Time is far more fluid concept than before.
All of this paint a pretty dismal picture and it will be unless we harness automation and divest its technological advancement from the motives of capitalism.
We must ensure that technology works for all of us and not just for the privileged few.
Technology at the moment is by its nature an ill-defined residue of hope and fear.
If we don’t want a world run by algorithms (that are raping us all every second of the day with high frequency trading,) and bill boards that respond to your anticipated needs from data supplied by your digital smart phone we must remain wary of interfacing too closely with machines.
We can stop the march of technological progress, but we can stop the downward pressure on wages stemming from automation, by guaranteed a minimum income that will mitigate the destructive impact of technology on labour.
The future has not been written, and issues will manifest themselves in different ways depending on the social, technological, economic and political changes in the world. These issues, however, will be important to any future in which organizations want to attract and retain the best talent.
The hire-to-retire cycle is being as you read this post retired.
What would my advise be?
Learn a Computer Language you are going to need to be able to talk to them.