Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Technology appears to be changing so fast that culture and jobs cannot keep pace. This leads to a large group of people whose newly acquired skills never give birth to a new job.

Culture adjusts to technology. The automobile displaced everyone in the horse and buggy industry. The culture and the economy adjusted and jobs increased.

Cultural adjustment takes time, an amount of time that is greater than zero. Let’s denote the time required for cultural adjustment as Culture_Time.

Today, technology is changing quickly. Let’s denote the amount of time that it takes technology to change as Technology_Time.

One of our great problems is that Technology_Time is small and decreasing. In many areas, Technology_Time is much less than Culture_Time. This means that people in the culture and the economy (mainly jobs) are still trying to adjust to a tech change that was three or four changes back. When the people adjust, the new jobs have already been replaced several times. This leads to a class of people who are in perpetual pregnancy.

Their newly acquired skills never give birth to a new job.

So what do we do? No one seems to have a good answer as we haven’t run into this problem before.

Try to move into a line of work that isn’t changing so fast, e.g., be a barber or the guy who serves cool drinks to the new tech millionaires who are lounging on the beach in the Bahamas. Those jobs don’t pay so well? Ah, too bad. See above discussing the novelty of this problem.