Service sector jobs are not immune to automation. Eventually, inevitably, societies will put those who failed competition for highly creative jobs (something like 95% of population) on some form of welfare.
I don't think it's the most likely possibility, necessarily, but I'm totally open to the idea that near-full employment was a brief historical blip, caused by the momentary usefulness of humans as wet robots during the early days of automation, creating demand for them as 'employees.'
I sometimes suspect that both education and employment, at least as we know them now, are just blips caused by temporary conditions, and that may well revert to a less rosy historical mean. (I don't think that's a good thing, either -- history, uh, sucked).
Take education - what the heck chance does the current educational model stand of preparing people to be, say, a programmer?
It's not hard to learn programming. Not at all. And yet after 12 years of public school, 40-60% of the people who want to be programmers are weeded out of their very first year. That's a fairly damning indictment, given that programming is about the 'softest' engineering discipline out there.
But the truth is that most designers didn't start from zero in college, and most programmers the same. We came in knowing something, maybe knowing a whole bunch, maybe having done it since we were kids.
Industrial-age schools worked when it only needed to produce wet robots. What if that was a blip, and systems of apprenticeship, which are a natural fit for skills that may take several years of on-the-job experience to be really useful in, turn out to be the right model?
I don't think it's the most likely possibility, necessarily, but I'm totally open to the idea that near-full employment was a brief historical blip, caused by the momentary usefulness of humans as wet robots during the early days of automation, creating demand for them as 'employees.'
I sometimes suspect that both education and employment, at least as we know them now, are just blips caused by temporary conditions, and that may well revert to a less rosy historical mean. (I don't think that's a good thing, either -- history, uh, sucked).
Take education - what the heck chance does the current educational model stand of preparing people to be, say, a programmer?
It's not hard to learn programming. Not at all. And yet after 12 years of public school, 40-60% of the people who want to be programmers are weeded out of their very first year. That's a fairly damning indictment, given that programming is about the 'softest' engineering discipline out there.
But the truth is that most designers didn't start from zero in college, and most programmers the same. We came in knowing something, maybe knowing a whole bunch, maybe having done it since we were kids.
Industrial-age schools worked when it only needed to produce wet robots. What if that was a blip, and systems of apprenticeship, which are a natural fit for skills that may take several years of on-the-job experience to be really useful in, turn out to be the right model?