Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged commodity → View Popular, Search in Google

Nov

2011

Are Workers Too Productive?

"There's mounting evidence that Moore's Law applies to commodity work -- labor that can be produced by many different individuals with a minimal amount of training. It's difficult to distinguish the output of one commodity worker from another, just as it is difficult to differentiate wheat grown on one farm from wheat grown on another. If Moore's Law applies to commodity work, commodity workers are in big trouble."

www.theatlantic.com/...246454

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productivity work employment mooreslaw commodity commoditywork skills

Noyce maintained that the proper way to measure the industry's productivity was to measure output not in dollars but in transistors per employee. By that measure, our productivity was growing at 40 percent per yea
I suspect that just as the number of transistors in an integrated circuit continues to grow at an exponential rate, commodity workers using computers and the Internet are increasing their productivity at an exponential rate.
2 more annotation(s)...
- If worker productivity is growing at an exponential rate and lots of new facilities are being built, we are at the point where commodity worker output can easily exceed the demand
- The value of doing those commodity chores is dropping as well and so to maintain our current salary, we have to run faster as well