A key concern is whether there will be enough good jobs for people with insufficient intelligence or training in post-material world.
It is common for anyone who has lived in a developing country to see a big divide between plenty of people who hold unskilled service jobs and a much smaller minority whose jobs require some sort of intellectual abilities or high-level salesmanship. Wage of the latter group is 7-20 times larger than the former. The middle group, whose jobs revolve around routine skills like clerical or secretarial tasks, see their jobs disappear one by one. For example, Google translation and IBM's Watson systems, once a bit more mature, will be better than lower-skilled translators and researchers.
If middle-tier jobs are reduced to an insignificant amount, the world of jobs will be divided into two major classes:
1) Jobs that require high-level of intelligence to make decisions/automate tasks/invent new technology or those that require purposeful human relations building and salesmanship.
2) Jobs to service those holding jobs in class 1)
The problem, as implied by the article, is that the number of people needed to do jobs in class 1) is much smaller than world population. The excess of labor pool for jobs in class 2) leads to much reduced wages and clear division in standard of living. With increasing wealth in society and distribution program, people holding class-2 jobs can still live fairly comfortably, but the ideal of egalitarian society will be even further from reality than today. (Egalitarian societies did not exist for most of history; they are in fact quite an anomaly to appear in quite a few countries in the world today--even in imperfect form.) Will the class-1 job holders protest ever louder about increasing wealth redistribution to the mass? Will the class-2 job holders be unsatisfied with status quo and seek to confiscate more wealth from the other group?
Is there a good way to preserve the egalitarian ideal or at least achieve a harmonious society without violent changes? I invite you to discuss.
It is common for anyone who has lived in a developing country to see a big divide between plenty of people who hold unskilled service jobs and a much smaller minority whose jobs require some sort of intellectual abilities or high-level salesmanship. Wage of the latter group is 7-20 times larger than the former. The middle group, whose jobs revolve around routine skills like clerical or secretarial tasks, see their jobs disappear one by one. For example, Google translation and IBM's Watson systems, once a bit more mature, will be better than lower-skilled translators and researchers.
If middle-tier jobs are reduced to an insignificant amount, the world of jobs will be divided into two major classes:
1) Jobs that require high-level of intelligence to make decisions/automate tasks/invent new technology or those that require purposeful human relations building and salesmanship.
2) Jobs to service those holding jobs in class 1)
The problem, as implied by the article, is that the number of people needed to do jobs in class 1) is much smaller than world population. The excess of labor pool for jobs in class 2) leads to much reduced wages and clear division in standard of living. With increasing wealth in society and distribution program, people holding class-2 jobs can still live fairly comfortably, but the ideal of egalitarian society will be even further from reality than today. (Egalitarian societies did not exist for most of history; they are in fact quite an anomaly to appear in quite a few countries in the world today--even in imperfect form.) Will the class-1 job holders protest ever louder about increasing wealth redistribution to the mass? Will the class-2 job holders be unsatisfied with status quo and seek to confiscate more wealth from the other group?
Is there a good way to preserve the egalitarian ideal or at least achieve a harmonious society without violent changes? I invite you to discuss.