asterism
Congress != Progress
Between digital development and the internet you are absolutely right that things are changing in ways that few industries are entirely prepared to cope.
Any industry that involves information has changed so much that it's alarming. And the rate of those changes is only accelerating, too.
So off the top of my head, publishing, recording, entertainment, education and communications are currently attempting to cope with, and take advanatage of these technical changes.
But there's more, too.
Banking is changing, as is bill paying and on and on and on.
And every change does one thing that apparently few of us truly understand is the bleeding EDGE of this techological revolution
Every increase in efficiency also means some people are LOSING THEIR JOBS.
Take my business for example...I can now do ALONE the same amount of work that back in the mid 90s took 4 people to do.
You multiply that kind of increase in efficiency event by millions of small and large businesses and you have the a tsuami of UNEMPLOYABLE people.
It takes fewer and fewer people every day to create the wealth that society needs.
So naturally since we are pretending this is no problem. But for every winner of this change there are a huge number of losers.
Eventually most people will be UNEMPLOYABLE, folks.
This is going happen in the next thirty years or so assuming nothing else changes in society but these technogical advances.
The only real solution (other than mass murder, I mean) is a change in the social contract.
And lord knows the winners of this seachange in how things get done have no vested interest in giving a rats ass about this problem.
You see folks, capitalism is based on the notion of SCARCITY.
But in a lot of cases (everything invovling information) there is NO SCARCITY, in fact quite the opposite.
So KNOWLEDGE (and all those associated with intellectualy property and its dessimination) keeps going down in price.
And unlike the industrial revolution, the displaced workers won't have FACTORIES to work at.
Robots are already displacing factory workers and that trend will only continue.
And no EDUCATION is NOT the solution.
This increasingly production efficienct world only needs so many workers regardless of how educated they are.
Such a 1930s way of looking at the world.
If people can be replaced by robots then maybe the people should work smarter. The days of a guaranteed job at the factory have been gone for a long time. Air Conditioner repairmen still do well in Florida though.