Comin’ at ya . . .

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has an article by Aviva Hope Rutkin that you should read and ponder. “Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization”. 45% is the estimated job loss over the next 20 years.

The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. 

What's old is new again.

20 years? Hell, I might even still be alive. As this develops, Conservatives who go berserk at the idea of Food Stamps might want to get therapy. As well, “Liberals”, to use the US term, might want the same. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, this is scary: even the crappy jobs will be disappearing as technology develops.

Even if it's only the loss of 25%, not 45% of US jobs, there are going to be a lot of people who are under 40 when this happens who can't work if jobs don't exist, crappy or not, and if they don't starve to death, can expect to live another 30-40 years. Then there's the teenagers and twenty-somethings trying to enter the working world. And if all there is for them are crappy jobs, what will that do for future families?
Wherever he is, Karl Marx is probably laughing hysterically. How will Capitalism cope? As the robotics take over the work force, maybe we might just see a resurgence of “hand-made” items as the items of value.

Handy Hallmark

Believe me, I am grateful. It saves me so much time and trouble in listening to government officials, to know that once they use the word "academic" as an epithet I can stop listening at once and go take a shower instead.

In their minds, "academic" means "someone who spends their whole working life studying, researching and teaching one specific topic, and who therefore knows less about it than the boyos down at the Salisbury House Saturday morning breakfast club."

Rich Coleman BC's Minister of Housing and Social Development, sprang the A word early in his interview CBC interview this morning, as he pooh-poohed the insistence of Helen Lenskyj, professor emeritus in sociology at the University of Toronto, that virtually every Olympic host city swept their homeless under the rug prior to the big event. "This government has spent more money on housing initiatives than at any time in BC government," he proudly said, after he lost interest in declaring that Dr. Lenskyj didn't know what she was talking about because she had never delivered a social program. Oh, and this proposed bylaw is like totally unrelated to the fact of the looming Olympic invasion, due to strike during the bitter bonechilling cold of Vancouver's -- umm -- rainy season.

(Sorry, I am a Winnipegger and I must scoff. Nyah, nyah, our homeless are tougher than your homeless.)

The whole predictable, lamentable situation leads me to another rather claustrophobic question, and I will get there by way of a roomful of pennies.

Long ago in university, our professor in Psych 101 asked us all to take out a penny and flip it. Those who got "heads" flipped again. After a few iterations, we were left with only a couple of people out of a room of 300, whose every flip had come up roses. Were these people some miracle-workers? No, even us undergrads could not miss, seen in the aggregate, the falsity of that idea. They had just threaded a random maze and popped out the bottom when so many had been held back, also by plain chance.

Shift your view to the job market. It's true that skill and education and aptitude effect who is employed and who isn't, but luck also plays a part, and as productivity becomes higher the spots available to be fought over become fewer. In a country of millions, many will flip and get tails, and wind up with no income at all.

Question -- in a free nation like ours, where can the man of many tails be?

Literally, where can he be? If he cannot rent or buy, if he fears the tuberculosis or violence of shelters, if he cannot even set up a tent in the wilderness (it's Crown land, not his) than where can he be?

Everyone has to be somewhere. Where can you be, when your pennies give out?