futuramb:

In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has “turned the corner” and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.

Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”

OK, The Economist is now trying to discuss a fact that we futurists have been talking about for many years: technology will, as it once did to farmers and later industrial workers, replace even knowledge workers and dramatically change our world (again). Unemployment will therefore be relatively high until we redefine what we mean by employment or have gone through the structural and value changes that comes from reorganizing society around a different center of gravity than the traditional factory modelled institution.

As a futurist I am of course wondering: is it now time to leave these issues to the politicians and change our focus to things more far ahead into the future…?

A drastic reorganization of society when we agree that the purpose of life is not toil, but art?

10 November 2011 77 futuramb Permalink