employment - Bertrand Duperrin on Diigo

Mar

19

2012

A Detailed Critique of “Race Against the Machine”

"Race Against the Machine deserves praise for jump-starting an important discussion about the effect of technology on our economy. As the authors point out, the impact of computers and information technology has been largely left out of most analysis regarding causes of our current unemployment woes. This book, therefore, is an attempt to “put technology back in the discussion.”"

declineofscarcity.com/?p=1037

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IT work employment unemployment organization organizationalinnovation humancapital value valuecreation scarcity creativity education

A human-machine combo has the potential to be much more powerful than either a human or machine alone. So therefore it’s not simply a question of machines replacing humans. It’s a question of how can humans and machines best work together.
Moreover, as I’ve written about before on this site, the human-machine partnership can sometimes be less than the sum of its parts.
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- The authors go on to discuss the importance of “organizational innovation.” In particular, they discuss the creation of new business platforms that might empower humans to compete in new marketplaces.
- But this idea also has its problems. How many niches can there possibly be? Enough to provide employment for the legions of truck drivers and supermarket checkers who may soon be exiting the workforce?
- n general, I would agree that the unemployed represent a huge slack resource, and quite possibly somebody is going to come up with some previously unimagined way to harness this large pool of people. But at the moment, such organizational innovation is just a theory. I do not see the seeds of a workable solution in the current crop of platforms.
- More importantly we should examine the term “value-creating fields.” Value under our current system is closely tied to scarcity. Digital abundance directly undermines this source of value. So once again we are confronted with an intellectual property challenge. If we are going to have an economy where everyone is an expert in a different field and produces “bits,” we are going to need a mechanism by which these non-scarce bits translate into an income
- Yes of course. Human creativity is astounding, and everyone has something to offer. But peoples’ output—however unique, interesting, and valuable—will not necessarily be monetizable. Especially in an abundant digital environment.
- Any jobs that depend upon having exclusive access to knowledge that no one else has are potentially at risk in a world where increasingly everyone is connected and data is widely shared.
- Education seems like the most straightforward solution to our problem. If our skills are falling behind, then we’d better acquire new skills right?
- But all of these considerations aside, there is a much bigger problem. One cannot escape the simple truth that humans learn slowly and technology advances quickly.
- Most of these suggestions are great, and might lead to a better society, but it is unclear how any of them will create jobs.
- The authors repeatedly state that our institutions are losing a race with technology. But they do not consider the possibility that our economy itself might be one of these trailing institutions.

Dec

29

2011

How to Improve the Economy and Beat Bureaucracy: Hire Small Businesses as Suppliers

Becoming a supplier to a large business can be just a pain, particularly if you are a small business. The overhead involved can even consume more time and effort than the actual work itself. When you consider that in the US 70% of our businesses are small and medium sized, this is a large scale headache. More so, what is crucial is that small businesses hire employees faster. The White House Blog indicated that: “after a small supplier lands a big purchase order or a contract from a bigger company, the small company’s revenues go up 250% and they create about 150% more jobs in just two or three years.”

To get a stalled economy moving again, improving the purchasing process in large businesses particularly in relation to hiring small suppliers would do wonders for everyone. Within these processes, there can be small changes that can create large waves of transformations that help to open up the economy."

www.forbes.com/...-small-businesses-as-suppliers

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smb jobcreation employment bureaucracy economy

Dec

19

2011

More Management Equals Less Output

"Societies have never been good at moving from one big tech-induced change to another. The industrial revolution wrought havoc on populations. Production lines were thought to dehumanise people, and modern agriculture is still vilified, instead of being celebrated. And people now worry that technology will drive us towards some singularity where people are no longer required."

www.innovationexcellence.com/...-management-equals-less-output

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society employment jobs technology unemployment management

We are talking mass unemployment, people replaced by machines, old ways and conventions abandoned, history and tradition rendered worthless
Many cite oppressive and excessively demanding management regimes. And certainly the evidence is that the ratio of managers to active contributors and material expenditure has grown excessively, as depicted in this graph for one first-world nation.
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- : how big can the management population become before a company collapses, and how big can government become before a country collapses under the non-contributory bureaucratic weight?
- We might have expected technology to reduce the number of managers everywhere, but the number just seems to keep growing
- As a general principle, to be more creative, efficient and competitive, we need far less management in companies, government, and indeed in our electronic systems, and not more.

Nov

9

2011

3 étudiants sur 5 veulent de la mobilité et du télétravail [Zeclin d'oeil du 7-11-2011] | Zevillage

www.zevillage.net/...vail-zeclin-doeil-du-7-11-2011

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remotework employment students worklifebalance job humanresources mobility

Nov

5

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.
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- 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

Oct

25

2011

Economists See More Jobs for Machines, Not People

"A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "

www.nytimes.com/...s-for-machines-not-people.html

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machines jobs skills employment unemployment computers Automation creativity

The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work.
John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease” that he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.
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- Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns
- Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count,
- Yet computers, the authors say, tend to be narrow and literal-minded, good at assigned tasks but at a loss when a solution requires intuition and creativity — human traits. A partnership, they assert, is the path to job creation in the future.
- “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.”

Nov

29

2010

Y generation and work: are they so different?

"The cognitive schemas are studied with cognitive maps. The maps of three groups of individuals are compared: “Generation Y” before (N = 160) and after their initial recruitment (N = 127) and employees of the previous generation (N = 113).
The results show that the cognitive schemas of Y employees don’t differ from those of members of the previous generation. They differ, however, from those of the Y students. The results tend to shows that the Y’s schemas don’t depend on their generational membership."

www.nouvelles-carrieres.fr/?p=258

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generationy cognitivemaps humanresources employment management

Oct

21

2008

Why the Financial Crisis is (Mostly) Good News for Gen Y - Tammy Erickson

And here's the irony. Despite a slowdown in immediate career opportunities, the current financial crisis is likely to reinforce the overall happy, fortuitous economic life of Generation Y.

discussionleader.hbsp.com/...he_financial_crisis_is_mo.html

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crisis jobmarket employment generationy

And unlike Boomers, who are racing to build up a nest egg before retirement hits and in many cases trying to make up for a life of limited savings, Y's have no such time pressure. The key job challenge for Y's in this job market will be to find the challenging opportunities for learning that they crave. In many ways, their greater financial flexibility may give them an advantage over older generations for some of the interesting opportunities.