Give up AC to save future generations?

I know exactly two people who have to "go to work" because of the nature of their work, not because their boss is an idiot. One is a security guard and the other is a motor pool mechanic. They both work at Dulles Airport, and the only reason airports are so heavily used is that some foolish people have a compulsion to actually "go to work" in distant cities where they do nothing but attend meetings (and get away from their wives).

Every day I ride a subway crammed with people who carry briefcases full of paper back and forth in the era of the "paperless office," plus the cleaning, security, food service and infrastructure maintenance staff who support their quaint, stressful, inefficient and resource-wasting 20th-century workstyle.

Yes I understand that there are gardeners and handymen who have to do their jobs on site, yet how many of us would need to hire them if we weren't wasting fifteen to thirty hours every week getting dressed for work, going there, and standing in line in the cafeteria? There are bulldozer drivers, plumbers and people who pour cement, but most of them are erecting office buildings, highways, rail lines and fast food franchises to support our commuter culture.

The nature of work is rapidly shifting toward "knowledge work," which requires only a computer and some more sophisticated video communication technology than most of us have at the moment. There will always be lots of occupations that require working on location, but the actual percentage of the workforce employed in those occupations has been falling for decades. Much of the work has been automated, like farming and manufacturing. Much of the work that my grandparents insisted required human contact has been redefined by a generation that's growing up with the virtual community of cellphones, chat rooms and MOMRPGs.

Teaching, insurance, journalism, software development, finance, government, retail sales, most engineering, most academic research, these are jobs that can be done virtually or with only occasional visits to a central location or client site. The Japanese have even pioneered remote medical diagnosis.

Your turn. Name some occupations that justify more than, say, 25% of the American workforce leaving home every day. And be careful not to include occupations that are nothing more than the second-order effects of the commuter culture, such as nannies and auto mechanics.

Actually, as recently as the turn of the last century, something like 95% of the U.S. population were farmers.

That is an entire employment sector that has been eliminated as a major occupation due to industrial technology. Does anyone seriously believe that information and communication technology won't do the same to a vast number of 20th-century jobs?

The shift from farming to industry got people off the farms and into the city. The shift from industry to a virtual economy will get them out of the city and living anywhere they want. Most importantly, it will get them off the damn roads!

 

Exactly. Who's the fool here? Max seems to think that fifty million Americans are engaged in that type of work. Yeah right. How many of them do you encounter in a year?

The auto industry is one of America's largest employers of non-knowledge workers (maybe the largest anymore?), and their total blue-collar workforce is at most five million. And I specifically reminded you that those jobs don't count because most of them are second-order effects of our commuting lifestyle. Most auto mileage is racked up by commuting. Once we stop "going to work" our cars will last four times as long and many families will realize they can get by with one car instead of two or three.

Regardless of what happens to the Big Three, their glory days are numbered. Moreover, the American factories that build foreign-marque cars are far more automated than Detroit's Dickensian contraptions and don't use as many workers.

Drycleaning??? How many of you buy clothes that need drycleaning? Max is showing his age. For that matter I'm older than Max and I have a real dinosaur-era office job, and I still manage to dress up spiffy with only clothes that go in the washing machine. Once every couple of years I get a stain on a silk necktie and have to have it cleaned.

Farming? Talk about out of touch. That is highly automated. A little too much in fact. The animals are treated like machinery to the point of cruelty and we just had to pass Proposition Eight to inject a modicum of dignity into the process.

Packaging? Max talks like he hasn't seen an assembly line since 1965. Those processes require minimal human labor.

Haircuts? I can just picture Max in his 1950s soldier-boy haircut going to a barber every two weeks. I've had long hair since the 1960s and I go to a salon about four times a year.

The jobs on Max's list are real. But with automation and efficiency they simply don't keep a whole lot of people employed. Not nearly as many as the rest of us who work behind desks doing things that in a sensible world could be done with nothing more than an internet connection, including videoconferencing hardware.

Just look at that list. I'd say the majority of those jobs are in the public sector. We've got really good stats on that. The total federal civilian workforce is about fifteen million and there are probably an approximately equal total number employed by state and local governments, including school districts, etc. (Los Angeles County, the largest municipal government on the planet, has fewer than 100,000 employees.) That is indeed a lot of people, but wait... Most government employees are knowledge workers. Sure you've got your cops and dog catchers and schoolteachers and judges and the guys who fix broken water mains and keep the dams generating electricity and all the hands-on medical personnel from brain surgeons to EMTs to orderlies. But I spent most of my life working for a large municipal government and those people who actually do real old-fashioned work every day are vastly outnumbered by office staff.

Of the thirty million people with government jobs in our country, I'm absolutely confident saying that at least fifteen million of them are knowledge workers. I'm not even going to bother trying to substantiate the ratio I estimated earlier because I don't need to to make my point. (And don't get me started on my insider's jokes about the triple oxymoron in the phrase "government/knowledge/workers."

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) After all, government was the first bastion of knowledge work, going all the way back to Babylon and the first written language. Government was the first citadel of digital computers.

This calculation withstands a reality test. There are fewer than three million teachers in the USA, a major portion of the government workforce that is not engaged in bureaucratic desk work. Hmm... and considering how well America's children have adapted to the internet--better than their parents!--perhaps teaching should become a telecommuting career!

So I stand by my hypothesis. I simply do not believe that there are anywhere near fifty million Americans performing work that cannot reasonably be done from their homes with technology that is already available and will be affordable in a few years. I'm certain the number is no more than half of that, which means that more than three-fourths of our workers don't need to commute.

The Industrial Era is OVER. Get used to it, Baron.

 

How many examples of past technologies do you need as supporting evidence?

• My grandfather thought horseless carriages had a lot of promise once they perfected accessories like windows and electric starters, but it was ludicrous to think they could ever be a major component of our culture. After all, the roads are so rough that they can't maintain an average speed much faster than a horse anyway!
• No one will ever feel comfortable transacting business over a telephone. You've got to look the other person in the eyes.
• Radios are nice for news and soap operas, but who could stand to listen to music seriously with such poor tone and so much static?
• Desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas will never boom. Air conditioning is prohibitively expensive for home installation.
• There is a world market for about fifty computers and that's the end of it.

It works the other way too. You kids are too young to remember the slogan "Better Living through Chemistry" or Reddy Kilowatt, the mascot of a power industry with unlimited generation capacity.

We have access to our network from home. The only problem I have is that it was not designed to be Mac-compatible so I have to boot my <ugh phooey> Windows Box.

There actually is an old LAN here with a client-server system, and I'm on the project to replace it with an internet application. Welcome to the 21st century, dude?

You're missing all of the younger generation who already have a virtual "workplace." Two forces are colliding: 1. You don't need to be as much of a geek to use a computer as you used to; 2. Younger people are bigger geeks than we were. I've got a 24-year-old tenant upstairs who does his job from home about four days a week. Whenever I have a computer problem he comes down, rolls his eyes, makes some smart remark about "grandpa" and fixes it in about five minutes. Oh yeah, his mom lives up there too and works at home; she's closer to my age and she's a web designer!

The younger generation is clearly adapting to information technology. They will not have to work on-site to get their jobs done, as soon as more of that technology matures, such as videoconferencing and wireless communication.

The complexity of IT systems is already on the wane; we're seeing the modest beginning of the commodification of system components. These days you can build a data warehouse out of generic hardware and software. IT development will be like plumbing: figure out what standard parts you need and hook them together with standard tools, with a minimum of customization.

Sounds like you work in a shop that's at CMM(I) "Level Zero." That's the consultants' little insider joke meaning "We can't even spell CMM(I) here." We've got to have repeatable processes, established requirements, measurability, quality and ergonomic standards, documentation that's readable, and a host of other things that are second nature to every other engineering profession, before we can call ourselves "software engineers" with a straight face. Fortunately a lot of places have them. Sorry yours isn't one of them.

I'm a technical writer. I write those things for a living. Although I've spent more time writing documents for developers and project managers than for end users, because the process has to start at the bottom.

Still, you can thank our educational system, not the IT industry, for the fact that most Americans can't write a coherent sentence, much less a whole handbook. Works for me, I get to do all of it.

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You just don't understand the post-industrial economy at all, do you? The new commodity is information. People gather it, analyze it, reduce it, package it, sell it, buy it, use it, and then recombine it and gather it anew to start the cycle over.

Of course this use of the term "information" rankles me both as a linguist and an IT professional, since it largely overlaps what should be called "data." In addition to text files and accounting records, it includes sound and video, as well as process control data (including software)... and whatever's coming next.

And, from an economic perspective, one of the key reasons this is truly a Paradigm Shift is that information is a whole new type of commodity. The entire information sector of the economy is information-intensive.

• Its consumption of physical raw materials is incidental.
• Its major resource is labor, and "knowledge work" at that.
• Once information is produced, the cost of distributing it is incidental.
• But most importantly, the cost of reproducing it is also incidental.

This completely busts the supply-and-demand model of the industrial economy. The supply of information is limited only by the cleverness of the people who are gathering, analyzing, reducing and packaging it. And its growth is not linear. The more information there is, the more clever we are with mining what we've got and coming up with new applications for it, the faster the supply of new information will grow. Look at music sampling as a primitive example and Wikipedia as a rough-hewn prototype. MOMRPGs are an entire new kind of social interaction made possible by the new commodity, a new kind of relationship as unpredicted as surrogate motherhood.

You simply cannot apply the rules of Industrial Era economics to this. Any more than the most intelligent and well-educated shopkeeper in the pre-industrial age could have imagined the workings of capitalism in the Industrial Era such as the artifact of the corporation, the mass migration of people off of the farms, and the concept of discretionary income. In his day 99 percent of "the economy" was food.

The answer to your questions is "information." As for "running out of things to sell," the answer is "never." And the whole principle of "supply and demand" will be redefined, if it even survives the Paradigm Shift.

This is why you're miscounting the labor force. You don't see knowledge work as real work with real economic value, so you don't understand how it will one day drive the economy--probably sooner than we think. Our younger members may live to see the aggregate value of information exceed the value of manufactured goods.