Thank you, KG. I spent this morning reading that article and collecting
the loose ends of my thoughts and opinions on this matter.
I like the phrase offered in the article: "AMERICA DISCOVERS. THE WORLD
DELIVERS." a lot.
I don't believe protectionism/isolationism will help today any more than
in the past, because equilibrium, not strongholds must ultimately
prevail. Cooperation, not confrontation, is the road to peace and
prosperity.
People are worried there is a decline in work to be done? Today, the
average citizen has virtually no access to the greatest body of law the
world has ever developed. Communications may make our global chat
possible, but our neighborhoods don't have a clue as to how to tap the
potential. Our schools are still standing at the edge of integrating
what can be. Our democratic election process hasn't improved one iota.
Our information age is up to goggle-style keyword searches against vast
bodies of raw data, and that alone should clearly demonstrate how much
needs to be done to deliver real information. Our view of the world
around us is controlled by a handful of people, and if that doesn't say
there's room for improvement, nothing does.
Not only are we a long way from delivering the promise of technology, we
still haven't figured out how to deal with the political, social and
legal implications of changes we've already made. Do we want a Brave New
World or a better world? In case anyone hasn't noticed, technology is
doing a whole lot for those at the top, but the average person sees way
too little. Isn't it time to reverse that trend? We've been
conditioned, and we've kept our eyes closed for too long, now we need to
wake up and smell a future that we can make happen. And that's going to
take a lot of work.
Delivering the cumulative knowledge of mankind, from medicine to
farming, from law to the news, is not only our playground and our
challenge, it must be our destiny. Technology has and is changing our
world like no other force before, yet today we're acting as though the
base of the mountain is the top.
To the people who are fearful of change and the shrinking world: look
around you, and ask yourself if what you're seeing is a world the way
you want it to be. If you think it is, then what are you complaining
about? If it isn't, then there is work to be done!
To the people who welcome change and see what needs to be done: may the
force be with you, because as change starts to shake the empires at the
top, that's where you'll meet real resistance.
To the people who are down and out at the moment because of change: stop
and think about how your plight can be turned into opportunity. You
know how to implement technology, and that puts you ahead of 90% of the
world's population in that regard, surely you can find some way to do
something even more rewarding than the job you lost. Just remember that
you can't sit in a vacuum and wait for work to find you. You've got to
get on the phone, travel, meet and talk to people. Examine your feelings
and decide what you want to do now that you're grown up, and then find
people with the same interest.
---
There's another, practical side to all this: maintenance and support. In
the decades since the beginning of commercial computer applications,
gazillions of lines of code have been written. We don't like MS paradigm
shifts one bit, but every time it happens, the amount of related support
and maintenance work that needs to be done grows exponentially. Our
world has gotten so complicated by these shifts that we in the business
can barely keep up with it. It takes a lot of people to maintain and
support all that. Had the world instead stuck with the original IBM
languages, things would be completely different. IOW, that we have so
many people working in the software world today is a fluke of history in
the first place. The trajectory as it happened could be seen as
illogical, but it was as it was. Given the reality of that history, a
best guess would say more shifts are yet to come, and that means more,
lot less, work.
Bill
>
> This is indeed an interesting read.
>
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india_pr.html
>
©2004 Bill Arnold |
