TECHNOLOGY: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UNKNOWN.

At this point, almost all of us are “buying in”....even grandma has a smartphone....and beyond that, well beyond that......we see technology making a colossal and breathtaking footprint on our lives that should not be underestimated...from personal data collection and it’s ensuant controversies, to the pending ”self driving” cars.......and everything in between. Kurt Vonnegut has entered the building!

My guess is that there is a ”tipping point” at which time technology becomes more threatening to society than advantageous. There is little doubt that technology is substituting for our work force....

• “the logical endpoint to this substitutionist thinking is called ”strong A1”: computers that eclipse humans on every important dimension. Of course, the Luddites* are terrified by the possibility. It even makes the futurists a little uneasy: it’s not clear whether strong A1 would save humanity or doom it. Technology is supposed? to increase our mastery of nature, and reduce the role of chance in our lives; building smarter-than-human computers could actually bring chance back with a vengeance. Strong A1 is like a cosmic lottery ticket: if we win, we get utopia; if we lose, Skynet substitutes us out of existence.” - Peter Thiel from “Zero to 1“
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Dehumanization has always been an important word and concept....traditionally it has referred to man’s inhumanity to man (and mostly woman). It conjures up beastly behavior that devalues human life and dignity.....fast approaching is a new form of dehumanization...one that melts to automation and microchips.

..Nihilo Sanctum Estne?

Should we be even slightly surprised that wealth and power is being even more concentrated at the top..........? A giant workforce used to be mandatory in order to be a billion dollar company....the Railroads, or the Airlines, Walmart, Ford Motor, or any number of manufacturing businesses. Now, you can be lean as a a single amino acid....a start up tech company that makes no box-able product can be pulling billions in a few years, if not months...they don’t need manufacturing, or trucking, they barely need a board of directors.....that money gets sucked out of somewhere (and somebodies). It is being increasingly consolidated into smaller and smaller groups....and, with computerization being able to save millions and millions on labor....where does that leave us, today, and for the future? Mergers and acquisitions are the ”mother lode”, and they may bring lower prices to the consumer in the short term, but the long term benefits are almost always reaped by the company itself, by virtue of downsizing the workforce.

The % of people doing clerical jobs in this country is staggering...some estimate it to be around 40%.

“A less dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on employment, is taking place in clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks. Countless traditional white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and in customer service, have disappeared. W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s intelligence systems lab and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the “autonomous economy.” It’s far more subtle than the idea of robots and automation doing human jobs, he says: it involves “digital processes talking to other digital processes and creating new processes,” enabling us to do many things with fewer people and making yet other human jobs obsolete.” - David Rotman ”How Technology is destroying jobs”

It’s worth a look....what should our children be learning (now) in order to have the best chance at success in this new and exponentially changing playing field? I am not so sure that an Accounting job (to name just one) is going to survive the neo-Darwinian laws of the future. Accounting starts with an ”A”, the first letter in the alphabet.... I’ll let (you) take it from here.

Food for thought.......

*The Luddites were 19th-century English textile workers who protested against newly developed labour-economizing technologies from 1811 to 1816.