End of work as we know it

This is basically what people do at work. We need bigger screens though.

The new land

"Wait where did our jobs go?"

The landscape of working has been changing very swiftly in the past decades. New job titles, companies and industries are born and decline before most of us even realize it. Formal education is lagging far behind to what is needed or expected in companies. The need for individuals to step up the pace of their own skills development is increasing. If you can't keep up you face the risk of becoming obsolete to the work markets. The learning cycle in companies is speeding up as agile, lean an other managerial processes step in. The mediocre skills, good salary middle class positions are vanishing rapidly and the huge majority of white collar workers find themselves in new terrain. Can you keep up?

All the knowledge of humankind is already packed in a very accessible form that most of us carry in our pockets. It is no longer about the knowledge that one has but the ability to link proper information to the context at hand to make optimal decisions. It is about understanding causalities, correlations and meanings between seemingly separate factors. New theories, methodologies and even paradigms change the way work in being conducted.  Those who know how to tackle this kind of work mentality will prosper. Those who know how to embrace change and sail those winds will prosper. Those who can't will feel left out, detached and maybe even useless.

The world is changing fast. That's a fact and there no use fighting against it. The question here is are you building safety walls or wind turbines against the winds of change? Japan in the 19th century resisted industrialization to upkeep traditional values and their way of living. It took only four ironclad warships to demonstrate their weakness against modern technology. They faced reality as it was and after a brief civil war they set out to become one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth. We can of course duck down and hold our heads in the bush. Keep our old values and think the world hasn't changed. There are lots of conservative political forces in Europe that want to keep the status quo or even take couple of steps backwards. I understand people that can't cope with the speed of the change want to support this kind of mentality. Change is never easy and change for a conservative, change resistant person is almost down right impossible. This creates lots of tensions in societies as we adopt new and foreign influences that contradict old beliefs. Most metropolitan inhabitants around the world have more in common with each other than they usually have with their country men who live in rural parts of the country. A New Yorker and Hong Konger could shoot the breeze more readily with each other that with their compatriots from the bible belt or Western China. Where does this leave nations as the defining factor of culture?

The new jobscape

The pace of change is especially hard for large govermental bodies that need to adjust education and legislation to suit the new jobscape. What do we need to teach the kids of today if we have no idea about the jobs of tomorrow? How do we speed up the legislation process to serve the population in real time and not 10 years back tracking? How do we educate the legislators to become more tech savvy to even understand the reality of what they need to do? Big questions with lots of speculation of what could be the best answer. 

You seriously would like to screw every bolt yourself?

As the 19th century manufacturing revolution 'put a lot of people out jobs' so will the digitalization and robotization 'put a lot of people out of jobs' in the 21st century. Creative destruction sweeps obsolete jobs, technologies and practices in the dust bin of history and I think it's excellent news. I'm not sure who would be sad that we can't tighten that screw all day long in an assembly line anymore. Or that we don't need to manually do spreadsheets anymore. Lots of old job titles will be swept in to that dust bin and society as whole will win as people are freed from monotonic minimum wage jobs to aspire more interesting careers.

Let's say that all the jobs in the world could be done by machines. Computers and robots. Would we be all poor since we don't have jobs? Or would it free us to do what we desire the most? We could devote our time to our hobbies, social activities, arts, science and so forth. Our needs would be met and the only question remaining would be: "what would you like to spend your time on?" The challenge would be to spread the wealth some what equally amongst the population. This kind of challenges we are facing already since the disparity between the rich and the poor is growing ever wider. The trend, especially in digital industries, is that the winner takes it all and there's no room for second places. If this kind of polarization between the super successful and the rest grows too strong it will cause major disturbances in the society.

The loss of traditional jobs is not only affecting economics of nations but also has major impact in the micro level as well. Individuals that have been displaced by technology might feel that they have been betrayed. By their boss, by their company, by the society. These disgruntled people might be more willing oppose 'progress' than to be grateful of the great advancements in technology that enabled automatization to take his job. In the grand perspective the world took a step forward. From subjective point of view the world can shove it up his as*. The next generation might never find out that there even was such a job as 'taxi driver'. What an old fashioned thought that people would drive cars. It's like hand washing your own clothes.

Resource optimization

The only thing we have in this world is time, energy and resources. Time is the hours in our day as well as the days in our lives. Energy is the thing that moves our bodies, cars and lights our bulbs. Resources are the food we eat, the infrastructure that we use as well as the human effort we can put into the things we hold dear. 'Jobs' can be put to the category of resources as it is put so neatly in to the dehumanized box of 'Human Resources' in so many companies. The way we as a society learn to optimize the use of resources is the most crucial element that will determine the course of our future. 

It's still less risky than getting a bank loan

Capitalism with job titles and money as a tool of trade takes into consideration the human aspects of greed and aspiration to 'be better than others' to create motivation for individuals to excel. This of course creates problems of it's own and is not very sustainable way of doing things. Capitalism has also shown that it's fundamental problem is that most of the wealth accumulates to a small portion of people. The so called 1%. It is of course great to see some people succeed in such manner but it's not very egalitarian way to organize a society. Also it a tremendous waste of resources since this top 1% sits on top of most the wealth created like dragons on a pile of gold. Talk about a bottle neck when it comes to resource optimization.

Our ability to harness human ingenuity and energy to the creation of the society of the tomorrow is the key. How can we educate and empower the large masses to, as Gandhi would say it, become the change you want to see in the world? The society needs to become the image of it's inhabitants. Also those inhabitants need to face some hard facts about the realities of resource scarcity. The world is a very finite place. With soon 9 billion of us here we need to very mindful of each litre of gasoline we use. But with proper system to optimize the use of resources and the distribution of wealth if global warming doesn't kill us of I don't see any reason why the future wouldn't be much more prosperous place than now.

The not so dystopic future