Very Interesting Maurice!
Also very shortsighted.
If the farming/hunting/food gathering industry can proceed from nearly 100% of human effort (Caveman) to 90-99% preindustrial age, to 80% end of steam power to less than 2% today. This happened mostly because of the invention of power sources small and portable enough to run both the tractor and the fan to cool the driver and everything in between.
Freeing man from the need to expend nearly all of his energy in food and shelter (housing, clothing, heat, etc.) has enabled man to spend increasing time in the sciences and arts etc.. These are fields that were reserved for the very wealthy or very very very intelligent until we could afford them for the lesser positioned or slightly less talented (none of us today are Newton or Da Vinci).
That steadily increasing supply of scientists has culminated in today having more scientists living and working than dead and buried. Along the way these scientists have, since Watt improved the steam engine, in agriculture invented everything from mineral fertilizers, irrigation methods, to every form of powered tool. This is now culminating in the (as soon as OSHA allows) possibility (with GPS and Computer control) of a farmer being able to Plow, Disk, Harrow, Plant, Fertilize, Irrigate, Cultivate, and Harvest his fields and never once even have to look at or enter the field. All of that with huge increases in productivity and decreases in expense, mainly due to improvements in underlap/overlap, even ignoring the labor savings.
Shifting effort from man and animal to machine has eliminated the need for everybody striving to produce enough food to feed and clothe their families, to just 2% providing the raw materials.
Can you imagine? In 1942 just 61 years ago construction began on what is now considered the first electronic Computer, the ENIAC. It was fast enough to do 182 fixed digit multiplies per second, probably about 1000 times as fast a mathematician with an electric calculator of that era. Today your desktop can multiply faster than the entire human race combined using the best of modern electronic calculators.
As I have repeated over and over and few people can yet understand. Computers will continue to get smarter and smarter, at each stage of this increase in machine intelligence machines will be able to replace people in more and more jobs. In manufacturing silicon wafers, an area I am expert in, in the 1960's the best "Pullers" operated with a 10 oz. Crucible, a human operator controlled all phases of the operation, and grew a 1" ingot. Today one human operator, mostly loading/unloading/cleaning can operate 3 or 4 pullers growing 12" (300 mm) ingots from 330 lb. (150 KG) crucibles. Quite an improvement in technology. These pullers are intelligent enough to grow 99% of the time without operator intervention. This is happening in all areas of the economy. Another example, when I started as a Computer Field Engineer one job, aligning a tape unit, took about 5 hours. When I decided to leave Computer Field Engineering aligning an equivalent tape drive took mounting a test tape and pushing a button. In 1973 Mainframe Maintenance cost more than 30% of purchase price/year. 10 years later maintenance had been largely designed out with electronics replacing moving parts.
So please explain what job you will do when desktops and/or imbedded controllers have more intelligence than you have. Again Moore's Law forecasts personal computers with more intelligence than either of us in less than 15 years, and at a fraction of the cost of todays mid-line desktop.
BTW: Tell me where I can find that job installing fibre and web-cams, being recently a victim of "Job Outsourcing" and having been an ET and Computer Field Engineer all my life, I will happily install them for you.
Are you forecasting an end to improvements in Technology? Apparently not as you think "Cyberspace will keep us very very busy".
Unfortunately for the US Cyberspace is keeping India's people more and more busy. see "New service lines will boost growth in ITES-BPO" (Information Technology Export Service-Business process outsourcing) indiainfoline.com. Our IT and IS jobs as well as most financial and back office jobs are beginning to be outsourced to India. Is yours next? |
