Week 4 - The Present Future

 Trends now and before

The new global division of labour

    One of the most commonly talked about trends in any business management class, this still holds true to this day. However, the scale at which this has been done is somewhat disturbing. A lot of the time, it is done with such carelessness that it leaves the people back at home without any jobs, seeing as they were specialized/had been working these more routine jobs for a long time and are perhaps even completely incapable of taking on a new job. To some extent, an example of this can be seen in Estonia with the old factories. Estonia focused so largely on being an e-country that it sold off a large share of its own manufacturing, leaving a lot of older people without any jobs [as well as the country with bad imports - mostly importing raw wood for example, rather than actually doing something with it].

Population aging

2010 [dark bars] vs predicted 2060 [light] EU ages


    While there is not a lot to mention here, this also ties in with the previous section of outsourcing. The best people for creative, innovative jobs and the overall flagbearers of any shift in technology have been predominantly young people. What will happen to the EU when we take away the more routine jobs, but also face with an aging population that is more ill suited to be the pioneers of a more connected world? This also ties in with the fourth point of an increased welfare state, though, oddly enough, this is also being quite heavily pushed for by very young people [in their 20s] that have graduated from an economically insignificant major [such as gender science] and thus end up with low-paying jobs and university debts because they are unable to provide any real value to society.

The second phase of the information society: from technological to social development



    The problem with any type of development has been that it is always a very careful balance between keeping the ways of old and integrating new into them. This becomes more and more true as the scale becomes larger - the resisting forces become much greater, and thus the change has to be implemented more subtly. However, technological progression is speeding up at an exponential rate, where the difference between 50 years ago and concurrent times grows larger with every passing year. I believe what is referenced here is the fact that our social development does not follow such a rapid expansion, and because of that, it becomes increasingly more likely for us to stumble on older values. 
    The advent of intelligent automation has been paving the way for the third industrial revolution for a while now, but are we really ready for both the horror and the glory that is to come with it? Albeit a bit of an extreme example, the luddites of old times [fore]saw the increasing gaps in our society that came with the industrial revolution. Although their methods were very extreme, their reasons were not. We can reflect on them in the concurrent era, complaining about the income gaps between the poorest and the richest, and yet the trends are hardly stopping. Were the next industrial revolution to truly happen, what would happen to those unable to procure a higher education/job? What can we even do? Should this progress be halted, or should we leave those worse off into the dust?

References:
[2]- Peter Jackson - The Luddites :}

[[--I could have gone on for much longer but I was too scared to make this excessively long, seeing as commenting on any other trends would have resulted in at least another extra page, and it was mentioned that perhaps the blogs should not be overly long








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2 - Failure.. and success!

Image
 Academset      Technically just a more advanced version of the original Computing Center for Collective Use, the Academset was one of the only few examples of a 'decent' network structure during the Soviet era. Initially built only to serve the staff of the Leningrad Scientific Center, it began expanding during the late 70s, when various other institutions (such as factories), started becoming integrated into the network. After that point, it started growing more and more until it officially became the "Leningrad information-computer network of the SSSR" and was fully fledged into its 'final' iteration - the Academset, which also established links between the satellite countries under the Soviet reign.       The network had several issues, most notably the usage of the OSI protocol demanding a high amount of main memory from the central computers. After the fall of the Soviet union, the mainframe of the network was destroyed and Russia gained access to 'g
Read more

Week 15 - Ethics

 Ethics Act Utilitarianism      Act utilitarianism is the single most beneficial theory in the world, period. It narrates that the 'right' course of action in any situation is one that would grant the most overall positive net gain to every party involved (or the least negative gain). This means that in every case, following the theory would provide the most good - being, on a surface level, the clear cut winner. However, it skips out the individual part - as long as one person's individual suffering would pay for a multitude of other people being happier, then it is all good in the eyes of this theory. Furthermore, it is very difficult to quantify just how 'valuable' an action is to any given person, as everyone has a different measuring stick and there is a whole lot to leave for interpretation in these scenarios. But how does this tie into IT?     Well, for this topic, I will sadly have to be as bland as one possibly can be and talk about self-driving cars. I kno
Read more