Speculations

It would seem that we have met a crossroads in the requirements of labour markets. As was the case with the printers & their unions, and many other jobs, skilled manual labouring is now either gone, or going.

But it is worse than that. The wave technology advancement has required many organisations to update their operating practices & their infrastructure to keep with the times, and sadly people are not so easily updated with new skills and knowledge.

For a lot of people Arthur C Clarks third law has been in effect for a while now. To them technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is not just baby boomers and older, it is everyone who has never seriously thought about how the hardware or software they are using is likely to work, beyond the sequence of commands they know to illicit a given response. These people are increasingly going to find it harder to get work. There are hundreds of research assistants who’s job boils down to running one machine. They are educated, smart people who are the next to go in the coming decade. Their machines will be automated and they don’t even have unions to defend them.

This happens to all of us, we all have our tech support friends. I am that guy for some, but even as a self-promoted expert I need a hand here and there, and have a list of people I call.

The issue with the advance is that you can generally only get up two of the three options: affordable, intuitive, functional. and as budgets are the one constant in this world, you get to choose from functionality or ease of use.

At one end of the spectrum, you get over specified projects to deliver somewhat functional, unintelligible software to places like the civil service and other big industries. It tries to to everything, it takes ages to come into effect, it is full of holes and compromises, but it is often the only result of the process from which it came. The are few answers here beyond accepting that you either need to spend ten times as much up front or, scale down your vision.

The other end is where a lot of mobile apps are heading. Beautiful things that have increasing niche use cases. They are so easy to use that you think that they are the best solution to a problem. Then after a week, you delete it because it turns out that you don’t quite fit the niche as well as you thought or that it is often too narrow to do the one or to extra things that it needed to do to make it your go to tool.

In the long run there is the massive cost of inefficient work being done, because of the difficulties of learning and using new tools, and the support overhead when things go wrong. This is doubly hampered by the hiring cheeper employees, as the often require more training and more support. These jobs will get automated, because the people are not doing anything other than following simple instructions.

We need creativity back in schools, we need to have technology taught from as young an age as is possible, because these will literally be the only two things left after a while. If it is repetitive, a machine can do it, If not, then a human. 50 years from now the two jobs will be using the machines or designing them.

There is nothing wrong with this. There is no nobility in pointless toil. Hopefully we will evolve our thinking with our capabilities rather than limit our selves with old attitudes designed for harder times when toil brought survival.