is this our future?

I remember reading a lot of R. Buckminster Fuller back in the 70’s, where he theorized that the production efficiency of our society would increase to the degree that very few peo0ple would need to work to maintain this output. This was put forth as a good thing, where much of the monotonous labor and meaningless grind of daily life would be effectively erased. It sounded good…as far as it went, but a decade later I remember thinking of this area again (after rereading Eric Toffler’s Future Shock) and I considered the notion that there would be a rather noticeable boundary condition to this change in our society, and there would be quite a lot of dislocation (i.e. lots of obsolete workers), this started to look like a rather painful thing.

With this in mind, here is a link to the Economist, where, in an article the idea that massive unemployment may be a harbinger of times to come.

I present this not to cry wolf, but to present an interesting quest9ion to ponder…What if…we have millions of dislocated workers, and little or no real work for them (regardless of the state of the economy). What do we do with all of these people? Is a person’s real value explicitly related to what they do for work? Is this something which is already happening?

A lot to consider

Difference Engine: Luddite legacy
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence

It misses a crucial change that economists are loath to accept, though technologists have been concerned about it for several years. This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America’s current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerized automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.

This is unlike the job destruction and creation that has taken place continuously since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as machines gradually replaced the muscle-power of human laborers and horses. Today, automation is having an impact not just on routine work, but on cognitive and even creative tasks as well. A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence

What If This Is No Accident? What If This Is The Future?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/12/what-if-this-is-the-future