Tipping Point- Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates

[Gerard]

I've learned to distrust prognosis like this. Currently the world faces different problems that cost jobs than just technology.

Gerard

[trdsf]

Technology isn't the problem.  What's changed in the last 30 years is that the social contract between employer and employed has been shattered with the rise of supply-side/voodoo economics (take your pick).  An economy works when the money within it circulates, not when it collects in large, immobile pools.  Also, companies now consider their employees to be a drain on corporate profits, rather than the organization that keeps the company operating -- I'd love to see the BoD and middle-management corps of a major corporation try to cope with working the assembly lines and cash registers that actually make their product and/or bring in the cash at the street level.

I don't blame technology, I blame at least in part the rise of the MBA -- the idea that one doesn't need to know the business one's in, one just needs to know how to manage.  This leads to management and executives who have no real connection to their company beyond their paycheck, and I think we've seen the result: it rapidly becomes all about maximizing personal income regardless of the affect on the company because the company is an abstract thing, there's no personal connection and no personal pride in work to the management/executives.

[Gerard]

Technology isn't the problem.  What's changed in the last 30 years is that the social contract between employer and employed has been shattered with the rise of supply-side/voodoo economics (take your pick).  An economy works when the money within it circulates, not when it collects in large, immobile pools.  Also, companies now consider their employees to be a drain on corporate profits, rather than the organization that keeps the company operating -- I'd love to see the BoD and middle-management corps of a major corporation try to cope with working the assembly lines and cash registers that actually make their product and/or bring in the cash at the street level.

I don't blame technology, I blame at least in part the rise of the MBA -- the idea that one doesn't need to know the business one's in, one just needs to know how to manage.  This leads to management and executives who have no real connection to their company beyond their paycheck, and I think we've seen the result: it rapidly becomes all about maximizing personal income regardless of the affect on the company because the company is an abstract thing, there's no personal connection and no personal pride in work to the management/executives.

Sustaining quality and knowledge is what makes a business and an economy competitive. We stopped investing in that. We've been throwing both out the door in big quantities. In the short term that supplies big money to some. In the middle / long term it's destructive for everybody.

Gerard

[the_antithesis]

[trdsf]

Sustaining quality and knowledge is what makes a business and an economy competitive. We stopped investing in that. We've been throwing both out the door in big quantities. In the short term that supplies big money to some. In the middle / long term it's destructive for everybody.

Exactly.  The modern concept of business operations is maximizing short-term profit, not long term viability.  Your typical business will prefer to make a nickel today than a dollar tomorrow, the plan for making profits has more to do with positioning the company to be sold to someone else rather than with making a marketable product, and their definition of long-term planning is thinking about what to have for lunch when it's already 10.30 in the morning.