I saw this over at Ace of Spades and thought I have to post it here as well! Thus, the revival…
A report from researchers at Oxford has suggested that almost half of American jobs will be replaced by technology. While this sounds mighty grim, the upside take from the article is that this will emphasize the development of more creative and social skills. This would certainly be an interesting society! Full of writers and musicians? Maybe….but perhaps people will be more creative about things they are not about now. More refined solutions to ever more complex human problems!
This also hits an EOW theme….how can we really place psychological value in work when so many forces are trying to take it away from us?
The End of Work 
Good to hear from you! More, please.
Actually, it sounds far more cheerful than grim, once one stops to think about it. Consider. If you looked at American jobs in the late 1800s, most of them sere still in agriculture. The vast majority of those have been replaced by technology. And if you have ever done farm work (especially non-mechanized farm work!) that has to be accounted a good thing.
It’s always disruptive, of course, when a job gets replaced by a new and different one. All those agricultural workers had to learn new skills to go into manufacturing. And all those workers in the manufacturing industries had to learn new skills to move into office work in the last half of the 20th century. Not to mention that it’s scary moving out of your comfort zone into something new — no matter how much more comfortable the new position turns out to be. But technology is going to keep changing. And rolling it back, even if it were possible, would be far worse (and require learning a whole new set of skills for most of us!).
Subsistance agriculture, however “natural” it seems at a distance, is attactive only to those who have never actually experienced it full time. Which is why we still have people moving, eagerly!, into sweat shop factories in Asia — they have experience with subsistance as an alternative, and they are real clear which is better.
Ron, good to hear from you!
I’ve always thought of work as “typing.” I was raised by a mother whose concept of work solidified around 1948. But now people can type letters on their phones, or send complicated documents to Third World countries to be typeset. So I find I have to unearth all of those qualities I had to throw under a bus in order to be a good little worker, because good little workers are no longer needed. Or they’re in their 20’s and being worked to death and asked to do more work for less money.
It’s interesting to me that we still have an education system built around these older notions of work, and is itself very deeply entrenched, thus making change that much harder.
What will future education look like?