Yes. The point I was hoping to make with my posting is that we've set up
a system which, in fact, forces companies to make globally non-optimizing
choices in order to insure local optimization (i.e. their survival).
It isn't clear to me that retraining and skill migration is happening as
fast as, or even anywhere near as fast as the rate of technology's
encroaching on those jobs.
For a far better discussion of this than I could hope to give, check out
the book "The End of Work" by Rifkin. It examines this entire issue of
speed, technology and unemployment, from both a historical context (how is
this different from farms, fr'instance), as well as a current context. I'm
about 1/3 of the way through the book right now, so can't yet discuss it
intelligently.
- Stever
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Stever Robbins stever@mit.edu stever@verstek.com
Accept no substitutes! http://www.nlp.com/NLP/stever.html
"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever."