But culture struggles to upload its way out of the analog mentality.
2/22/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
Newspapers are a totally lame waste of resources. That is, except when they're used as birdcage or litterbox liner.
I still get depressed when I hear the newspaper delivery-person speeding down my street at 5 a.m., the plastic clap of sacks of paper smacking my neighbor's driveways like dead fish hoisted onto a concrete pier. I can't block from my mind the waste of paper, the ink, the way that unrecycled newsprint doesn't really biodegrade in landfills. I can't help but imagine how every morning thousands of people load up their cars to the headrests, on the way to deliver hundreds of piles of already-stale information -- articles about things I read about the night before on the Internet.
Why do people still subscribe to newspapers? What's the point? Last week, publisher Thomson Corp. announced it would sell off its newspaper assets, with the exception of its hometown paper Toronto Globe and Mail, to focus on electronic services for business. Translation: Long term, there.s better places to invest your money than in dailies.
Meantime, Hearst Corp. has been trying to sell the San Francisco Examiner since last August. Still no buyer. Hearst just announced it will fold Examiner operations with that of the San Francisco Chronicle; yet another major U.S. city will be faced with a virtual monopoly on local news distribution.
The Internet will ultimately eat newspapers alive, and smart publishing companies have developed locally oriented news portals. But still, the number of print newspaper subscribers is dwindling . gradually, steadily.
All the better, I say. Technology dominates. Automation dominates. Innovation dominates. Not participating in the curve of innovation is like sentencing oneself to psychological slavery. People who shy away from participating in computer culture will find that they will be able to understand less and less about their surrounding world. And they will feel increasingly marginalized.
Resisting the trend
Two years ago, United Auto Workers struck against General Motors because GM wanted to slash jobs and speed up production in its factories. Automation was GM's solution, but automation isn't cheap. Workers fought the trend, arguing that GM didn't need to cut 50,000 jobs. In essence, workers wouldn't make room for robots. They struggled to keep their jobs; figuratively speaking, they wouldn't cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper.
Not surprisingly, the percentage of American laborers belonging to unions has declined from 35% in the 1950s to nearly 10% today. The key has been the automation of jobs, which in turn creates a need for more service jobs, and the exportation of jobs to lower-wage countries. Automation converts a need for teams of manual laborers to a need for a few skilled laborers.
It.s funny how job cutbacks get all the news, though. Good news doesn.t make the headlines. "Rockwell International to cut 3,800 jobs" grabs a lot more attention than "Amazon to create 3,800 jobs." But this is what happens anyway.
A mid-1999 sampling of 1,200 American Management Association member corporations showed that firms planning to create jobs outnumbered those that weren't by nearly 2.5 to 1. Companies were six times more like to increase computer-technology spending than to cut back.
Technology speeding the process of making dinner, or doing the laundry, or cleaning the house, is appealing to many people. But the same people get worried when they feel as if their positions in the world is threatened by the rise of the machine. Perhaps the philosophy of job entitlement will die along with unions, and so will the selfish belief that employers should slog away at overcapacity just so that jobs aren't cut.
The death knell for unrewarding jobs
In previous generations, the best -- and only -- thing to do at age 20 was to find a job at the company that would care for you for a lifetime. You'd save up for a pension, which you'd enjoy at retirement at age 55, when you embark on 20 years of cruising around the countryside in your mobile home.
Those days are dwindling.
Thankfully.
So many jobs in this world are waiting to be eliminated by automation. How many factories could be cut in half if only robots were to take over the work of human hands. Newspapers. printing presses represent one category of cutbacks-in-the-waiting, as ink-stained workers will no longer have to stick their hands in malfunctioning newspaper rollers. No longer, either, will citizens be hired to kill chickens at food-processing plants, barrage residents with unsolicited phone calls, feign politeness when accepting deposits and checks in banks, or ring-up grocery bills in stadium-sized supermarkets.
Journalism, as we know it, could disappear, too. Imagine that! Just like computer animators working with three-dimensional space, writers will be able to type in the coordinates of their arguments, and let "journalators" write on their behalf. To be frank, I wish I could do that right now.
Entire generations are being saved from lifetimes of factory gloom.
My point is that so-called "semi-skilled" jobs will, for the most part, disappear. At the same time, the society-wide need to develop and enhance computer skills will be exacerbated. As dull jobs will be eliminated, so will high-skill tech jobs be created, and the lucrative lure of technological employment will expand exponentially.
The biotechnological self
Yet, are the cultures of the world ready for the remarkable journey ahead? Our collective understanding of the very nature of human existence will be challenged, and forced to evolve along with technology itself. We will, in essence, need to merge with the machine. The mindset of the biological self will be pushed aside by the notion of the biotechnological self.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines, MIT inventor Ray Kurzweil estimates that, in 2020, $1,000 (in today.s numbers) will buy enough computing speed and accuracy to match the power of the human brain. He writes further, "Supercomputers will reach the 20 million billion calculations per second capacity of the human brain around 2010, a decade earlier than personal computers."
In some social circles, Kurzweil's argument is a well-rehearsed commonplace, a truism. But his premise, and the premise of many like-minded "transhumanist" thinkers, glow with an indisputable brilliance: One day, neural networks -- computer simulations of the physical brain -- will outstrip the human brain's capacity for creativity, decision-making, and social skills. We will be able to "upload" our thoughts and personalities into these neural nets, and interact with our own and others' virtual selves.
Will the world be delivering newspapers in 2020, simply because some readers won't trust news that's delivered online? Or paying for groceries -- in cash -- from minimum-wage supermarket clerks, because food inspected first-hand is more safe? In both cases, I hope not. Let's hope, instead, that our mindsets adapt to the rapid changes brought on by automation, so that the cultural divide between the technological and untechnological thinking does not widen.
Next time I hear the newspaper drop on my driveway, I'll be reminded of how we're one step closer toward full immersion in digital life.