[projectvrm] Unprecedented change

[Guy Huntington < >]

Hi All,

I’ve been reading the threads with interest.  I have a slightly different perspective.  It can best be summarized by Shoshanna Zuboff’s quote from her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”

 

“One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented.”

 

She uses her house being struck by lightning as an example.  It began to catch fire.  She rushed around closing doors to rooms to prevent smoke damage and also picked up photos

As she exited the house, she watched the entire house burn down.  “I was blind to conditions that were unprecedented in my experience.”

 

This is the age in which we now live, i.e. unprecedented.  It’s global, yet we use nation states to deal with it.  It’s driven by technology which is now changing so fast, we can’t cognitively keep up with it.  Our climate is changing, yet we set nation state targets to deal with it, that look like it won’t meet the challenge.  Finally, there’s the point which led me to write this post, i.e. automation. 

 

Like Shoshanna, we use our old lenses, based on our history, to view forward.  Yes, we’ve seen automation, i.e. steam engines, factory lines, et al.  That’s how we view going forward, i.e. sure jobs will be lost but they’ll be replaced by other new jobs.  This was the American dream.  My point is I can’t see it happening.

 

In China, where labour is cheap, they have factories run by robots.

 

In the UK, there’s businesses built where they automate the back-end warehouses of central large shipping warehouses, using robots and air traffic control systems.  The result?  Only a few people now work there.

 

Where I live, In Vancouver, BC, there was an article in the paper this past weekend.  It was claiming that about 9,000 jobs could be lost in port handling facilities due to automation. 

 

In China, there was a study where they compared real doctors doing diagnosis versus robots.  Robots outperformed the doctors. For what it’s worth, over the next decade or so, I feel that all sorts of different job types, from doctors, lawyers through to people who do all sorts of other types of work, will begin to see reduced hours and then job loss. 

 

Our economies are built on  Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nation principles. The question that keeps appearing in my head is what is going to happen to those of us who are automated out of jobs, income and a sense of purpose?  What if most people don’t have work?  This question will slowly emerge into the mainstream as the years progress and job loss gains momentum. 

 

This is only the early days of what I think are unprecedented times.  It doesn’t mean today that the sky is falling.  It isn’t.  However, the fast-moving waters of technological change are swirling in.  It will produce an increasingly disruptive force in our economies, in our lives, in our jobs and on the planet. 

 

Regards,

Guy