Re: Nice to see these tech types...
It's already happening. Hell, it's already happened to a lot of people.
50 years ago you could drop out of highschool and get a job working a factory line by showing up and asking for one. My dad did. Both my uncles did. That simply isn't possible today. Those jobs already went. The supermarket checkout kid - another job that basically anyone can do - is disappearing at a rare of knots because self-checkout systems are so much cheaper for the companies. Go to my nearest out of town sainsburys and 25 years ago they had a line of 30 checkouts, all of which manned by someone. Now there are 4, and a ton of "self service" aisles that are constantly startled that you put an item in the bagging area - Oh, and those checkouts that are still there are mostly staffed by pensioners who have been forced back into subsistence type work for a variety of reasons so the kids leaving school without any qualifications can't get those jobs either.
The switchboard operators are gone. The typing pool is gone. Hell, the janitors are gone - we replaced them with cheap labour from outsourcing agencies - so instead of every business having a couple of employees who get full benefits, there are a couple of dozen local agencies supplying contract cleaners who get no benefits and have to work more anti-social hours because they're doing shifts across multiple businesses.
This isn't a new problem, most of those jobs have been gone for decades, but it's one that we refuse as a society to properly acknowledge. Everyone says "Technology puts some people out of work, sure, but it also generates new jobs so that's OK!" And it is OK, for someone like me. I have both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. I got one of those new high-technology jobs. But the highschool dropout who could previously get a job working the line, or cleaning floors, or serving customers, or any other number of low-skill jobs that used to exist now can't They're not going to become a systems reliability engineer, or a network architect, or a full-stack programmer. A lot of those people didn't drop out because they were lazy, they dropped out because like my father they had severe learning difficulties and they simply weren't ever going to graduate. The jobs technology created did not replace the jobs they lost. They're just not the same category of employment.
Even if they were lazy, that's hardly the point, because the destruction of jobs keeps coming faster and faster and everyone gets squeezed harder. Jobs that you could get on a couple of GCSEs now won't hire unless you have A levels. Jobs that you could have gotten with A levels you now won't get unless you have a graduate degree. The concept of "hire and train" is being absolutely ravaged as more and more people who could have decided "You know, I'm happy working this shop counter because what I really want to do is spend time with my children and the hours are good here" are getting forced out of those sorts of jobs. The competition for even entry-level skilled work is getting fiercer by the day.
Not everyone can be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a - here's one of those jobs that was created in the last 50 years - Software Platform Engineer. There's plenty of people I went to school with as a kid who simply are not capable of doing work that complex and it's ridiculous to think that they're going to be trained to. Once we've destroyed all the jobs people like that could once have gotten what do we do with those people?
The current plan seems to be "Berate them for being lazy and/or stupid and constantly try and take what little dignity they have away from them." This is a very bad idea. Quite apart from the fact that amongst those academically "failed" kids there might be any number of great artists, or musicians, or athletes - but we'll never find out because they have no opportunity to pursue those avenues - we're breeding an entire class of potentially multi-generationally unemployed people who are getting more and more angry and resentful - which, frankly, you can hardly blame them for.
I'm not a luddite - I actually quite like my high-paid tech job. I like the fact that there's been innovation that lets me do that kind of work. I'm certainly not saying "Smash up the steam-engines, tear down the factories" or any modern equivalent there-of, but we need to provide for the people in our society that this technology is putting out of work, and right now it does not look like we are doing that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
