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At the crossroads: Tech-heavy future can be viewed in divergent ways

"We’re in the midst of a fundamental transformation in the nature of work. This is a long-term historic shift that is taking place," he said. "If you’re a file clerk, secretary, middle manager, factory worker, telephone operator, librarian, chances are your job has already disappeared. If not, it’s going."

Technology can be interpreted in different ways. Enabler. Efficiency-builder. Moneymaker.

Jeremy Rifkin sees it as a crossroads.

By:
Brice Wallace
Deseret Morning News

http://www.nasvf.org/web/allpress.nsf/pages/8079

Rifkin, an author of many books about technology and the economy and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, believes the early 21st century information age could lead to either huge unemployment lines or "a great renaissance."

Speaking recently as part of the Weldon J. Taylor Executive Lecture Series at Westminster College, Rifkin described sweeping changes technology will bring to employment worldwide and the possible resulting societal ramifications.

"We’re in the midst of a fundamental transformation in the nature of work. This is a long-term historic shift that is taking place," he said. "If you’re a file clerk, secretary, middle manager, factory worker, telephone operator, librarian, chances are your job has already disappeared. If not, it’s going."

The world already has more than 1 billion people either unemployed or underemployed, and technology likely will cause that figure to rise because it allows for greater productivity with fewer workers, he said.

Much as technology moved people from the farms to manufacturing more than a century ago, factory jobs now represent only 15 percent of U.S. employment, down from about one-third 40 years ago, he said.

"We’re seeing a long-term structural change in the nature of work. These jobs aren’t coming back," he said. "What I’m going to tell you is that we’re beginning to see the end to factory labor, just like we saw in agriculture. By 2040, we will see the end of factory labor in the United States and around the world."

Even foreign countries, where supposedly cheap labor can be found, are having factories go high-tech. "You cannot compete in global markets with old-fashioned, labor-intensive factories, no matter where you are," he said.

A study of 22 countries indicates that the manufacturing sector’s productivity has been soaring, but those countries gained not a single manufacturing job during the past seven years, he said.

"The 20th century was about mass labor — human beings working side by side with machines. The 21st century is about boutique labor forces — small, elite. You’re never going to see tens of thousands of people walking out of the factory gate at biotech companies, nanotech companies, computer and software companies," Rifkin said. "The cheapest worker in the world is not as cheap as the intelligent technology that’s going to replace them in the 21st century."

In 30 years, a world of 6 billion people may have only 1 million manufacturing jobs. "And we’re not wrestling with the implications of what this means," he said.

At issue is how to prepare people for the changes and to share the fruits of improved productivity, he said. Depending on how society handles those, the tech-induced employment changes could be bad news or "the greatest single potential success story in the history of our species. It could go either way now."

A move from manufacturing could free up people from simple-repetitive tasks making things for others — a duty comprising 75 percent of the world’s jobs. "They are boring. They are not fun," Rifkin said.

But the transformation will include rewiring people’s brains to think of themselves as something other than machines. Rifkin asserted that politicos, human resources executives and company heads refer to people as being marketable and productive, with machine terms of "stress," "breakdown," "burnout," "overload" and "disconnect" being associated with people. "We have become as our machines," he said.

"It’s because we can’t imagine what a human being would do if we weren’t preparing them to be marketable and productive in the workplace. We have so narrowly defined the human spirit that we can’t get out of that box, that we can’t be anything more than a machine. And still every parent is saying to their kid, ‘We want you to get the right courses so you can be marketable and skilled.’ Hi ho, hi ho. It’s off to work we go.

"What we have is a lack of imagination, because what I’m talking about is a qualitative leap in human consciousness. If we make the leap, we could have a great renaissance in front of us. If we don’t make the leap and we’re not courageous enough to move beyond work as a way to define our life, we’re going to be in deep trouble. We’re already in deep trouble."

"Sharing the fruits" is not a strength of a capitalist structure, Rifkin said. The divide between the "haves" and "have-nots" has never been bigger, he said, noting that the 356 wealthiest people in the world have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 40 percent of the world’s population and that "two-thirds of the human population has never made a single telephone call in this global village we call a high-tech, neural grid."

One option in keeping more people working is to shift to shorter work days, he said. European countries with shorter days have found that productivity remains the same, if not better.

But America has yet to consider that option. "We’ve got CEOs in this country who say, ‘I want you to be first in and last out.’ . . . The mentality of American business leaders is ‘we want them in there long hours,’ " he said.

A shorter work week means more people can work, bring home paychecks, pay taxes and spend their earnings, while businesses get a flexible labor force. Some Americans consider the French "lazy and dilettantish and not good workers." But their productivity is higher than Americans’. "Work smart and get out," he described the French philosophy. "Work to live, not live to work, but do your job."

The ultimate goal of technology is to increase free time. "But the problem is, it’s a cruel joke we’ve played on ourselves. We’ve developed all this labor-saving, time-saving technology to increase productivity so we’d have more leisure time. The United States is leading in this technology and productivity revolution, but we also have the longest hours of work of any country in the world — higher than Korea and Japan. In Europe, they have 12 weeks off, we say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’"

Rifkin predicted that the European Union will have 35-hour work weeks by the end of the decade. "We’re not even talking about this here, in the nation of stress, where long lines of people are underemployed and some working too long and too hard," he said.

In addition to the other benefits, a shorter work week could provide people more time to help out cultural organizations, such as nonprofits. That help could be paid from a fund from taxing productivity gains or through penalties for corporate "negative activity."

That would represent a forging of human bonds, something computers can never do, and leave a legacy for future generations to "develop our empathetic relationship to life and the metaphysics of our existence," he said.

"This is an opportunity, the loss of jobs. It’s not the loss of jobs; it’s the discovery of being able to free the human spirit."

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