posted 06/22/09
at 9:16 pm
Okay, “time bomb” is a bit dramatic. Still, if you look at the span of modern civilization, much of the caliber of a nation is determined by the strength of its working class, which is, in turn, defined by how much work there actually is to do (and how many people there are to do it).
So, let’s imagine for a moment that we live in a world where technology evolves at an exponential rate. Let’s also imagine that, as newer and more efficient technologies emerge, they effectively do more work in less time with fewer resources (by definition). This ultimately means that there are fewer jobs available. Could this be a problem?
I’m not necessarily a neotechological-evangelist (I made that up, it sounded fancy in my head), but I think that, before too long (relatively speaking - maybe in the next 10-20 years), we will be faced with a shocking realization: all of those crazy futuristic scenarios we’d seen in movies or read about in books (what is… book?) will be becoming reality and all at once, we will stop dead in our tracks and muse, “Holy shit, it really happened”.
In the end, though (not of the world - after intense internal debate at Situation, we’ve decided will likely NOT end on December 21st, 2012, if you were wondering), it all comes down to gradual change. If this were an abrupt milestone - meaning, if some new technology emerged that changed the world in a very short amount of time - there might be some sort of social recoil, but as we are mostly accustomed to the rate at which our technology advances, we will probably be welcoming these changes every step of the way.
What’s the point, though? As needs and markets change, as manned factories are converted to automated processes, and as a human buffer is decreasingly necessary for societal interaction (meaning we don’t need middlemen to facilitate what we do - consider old switchboard operators, versus web servers that post our comments now, or allow us to video chat, etc), we will ultimately end up shifting our roles in the grand scheme of things. The web architects of today will be the pathfinders of tomorrow, and while labor will likely always be present (at least for a time), more and more people will continue to become tech-savvy and be involved with advanced technological fields.
