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Subject:  Re: Code for America Date:  10/9/2012  9:17 AM
Author:  Hawkwin Number:  9798 of 9954

Creative Destruction. Having something better and more efficient replace something old and inefficient.

Everything in moderation.

At its most basic, "creative destruction" (German: schöpferische Zerstörung) describes the way in which capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order.

From the same link:

Creative destruction can cause temporary economic distress. Layoffs of workers with obsolete working skills can be one price of innovations valued by consumers. Though a continually innovating economy generates new opportunities for workers to participate in more creative and productive enterprises (provided they can acquire the necessary skills), creative destruction can cause severe hardship in the short term, and in the long term for those who cannot acquire the skills and work experience.

I am all for innovation. That being said, I remain concerned about what happens when most if not all light industrial jobs are performed by robots. What happens when our transportation of goods and services is performed by robots. What happens when even the robots are built by other robots.

There was a time not long ago when most people worked on a farm. Now we have a large portion of our populace employed in some sort of manufacturing. That is one of the reasons unemployment remains so high - we have simply become so efficient that many of those manufacturing jobs are not likely to ever come back. Perhaps we can put those people to work on building infrastructure but certainly we can all envision a day when manual labor in manufacturing is atypical. I honestly don't know what those people are going to do when that time comes.

Publishers? Same as Kodak, it seems sad, buy if you can't adapt someone will eat you.

I am not talking about the death of a single industry (much less a single company), like a VCR. If Toshiba doesn't adapt and learn to make something else, some other company will. I am concerned with the death of an entire form of employment. Again, not saying it shouldn't happen but as a society (and as educators), we should be concerned with this. We need to be focused today on what skills individuals will need in 20 years and I could not guess what those skills might be for someone that would otherwise have a factory job today.

When the proverbial buggy whips went out of business, those working in that industry simply moved on to the next manufacturing job. As I stated above, I don't know what lower skilled labor is going to do when there simply are no lower skilled labor jobs left.