alt Hacker NewsNothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.
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The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while.
Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value.
But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows.
Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy.
What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.
1. People *across generations* had to skill up. 2. software being very opaque (very differently from agriculture/mechanized labour) imo is linked to having a plethora of support roles that cannot write software but "handle the human part" and help make it readable, while spreading accountability. Hopefully with a "more readable/more standardized" software development, those [product|project|people] management roles can stop being a drag/bottleneck. (code was never the bottleneck we repeat ourselves since age immemorial)