Re: [LINK] Why Learning To Code Won't Save Your Job

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

On 27/03/2016 12:16 PM, JanW wrote:
> At 11:22 AM 27/03/2016, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>
>> This article is adappted from Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How
>> Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff, 
> In the famous words of FUnderwood, when you don't like the game, turn over 
> the table.
>
> What if growth wasn't the driving metaphor? What if it was happiness, 
> fulfilment, creativity, caring, mutual support, sharing -- all those human 
> values thingos. What if money and acquisition, what's that word the Libs 
> always use? oh, right, 'aspiration', and greed weren't so exalted? It's all a 
> matter of perspective.

That perspective is economic, if you are government or big business
And power comes from money.
And often money trumps (so to speak) votes.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
email: b...@iimetro.com.au
web:   www.drbrd.com
web:   www.problemsfirst.com
Blog:  www.problemsfirst.com/blog

___
Link mailing list
Link@mailman.anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link

Re: [LINK] Why Learning To Code Won't Save Your Job

[JanW]

At 11:22 AM 27/03/2016, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:

>This article is adappted from Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How
>Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff, 

In the famous words of FUnderwood, when you don't like the game, turn over the 
table.

What if growth wasn't the driving metaphor? What if it was happiness, 
fulfilment, creativity, caring, mutual support, sharing -- all those human 
values thingos. What if money and acquisition, what's that word the Libs always 
use? oh, right, 'aspiration', and greed weren't so exalted? It's all a matter 
of perspective.

Happy bunny day, everyone.

Jan


I write books. http://janwhitaker.com/?page_id=8

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jw...@janwhitaker.com
Twitter: JL_Whitaker
Blog: www.janwhitaker.com 

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you 
fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space. 
~Margaret Atwood, writer 

_ __ _
___
Link mailing list
Link@mailman.anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link

[LINK] Why Learning To Code Won't Save Your Job

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Why Learning To Code Won't Save Your Job
Brushing up on your tech skills might only make for temporary job
security at best.
Douglas Rushkoff
25 March 2016
http://www.fastcompany.com/3058251/the-future-of-work/why-learning-to-code-wont-save-your-job

Looking for job security in the knowledge economy? Just learn to code.
At least, that’s what we’ve been telling young professionals and
mid-career workers alike who want to hack it in the modern workforce—in
fact, it’s advice I’ve given myself. And judging by the proliferation of
coding schools and bootcamps we’ve seen over the past few years, not a
few have eagerly heeded that instruction, thinking they’re shoring up
their livelihoods in the process.

"More and more, "learn to code" is looking like bad advice."

Unfortunately, many have already learned the hard way that even the best
coding chops have their limits. More and more, "learn to code" is
looking like bad advice.

Coding Can’t Save You

Anyone competent in languages such as Python, Java, or even Web coding
like HTML and CSS, is currently in high demand by businesses that are
still just gearing up for the digital marketplace. However, as coding
becomes more commonplace, particularly in developing nations like India,
we find a lot of that work is being assigned piecemeal by computerized
services such as Upwork to low-paid workers in digital sweatshops.

This trend is bound to increase. The better opportunity may be to use
your coding skills to develop an app or platform yourself, but this
means competing against thousands of others doing the same thing—and in
an online marketplace ruled by just about the same power dynamics as the
digital music business.

Besides, learning code is hard, particularly for adults who don’t
remember their algebra and haven’t been raised thinking algorithmically.
Learning code well enough to be a competent programmer is even harder.

Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital
society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code
literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal
ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of
book publishing.

It’s actually worse. A single computer program written by perhaps a
dozen developers can wipe out hundreds of jobs. As the author and
entrepreneur Andrew Keen has pointed out, digital companies employ 10
times fewer people per dollar earned than traditional companies. Every
time a company decides to relegate its computing to the cloud, it's free
to release a few more IT employees.

Most of the technologies we're currently developing replace or obsolesce
far more employment opportunities than they create. Those that
don’t—technologies that require ongoing human maintenance or
participation in order to work—are not supported by venture capital for
precisely this reason. They are considered unscalable because they
demand more paid human employees as the business grows.

Training Our Robo-Replacements

Finally, there are jobs for those willing to assist with our transition
to a more computerized society. As employment counselors like to point
out, self-checkout stations may have cost you your job as a supermarket
cashier, but there’s a new opening for that person who assists customers
having trouble scanning their items at the kiosk, swiping their debit
cards, or finding the SKU code for Swiss chard. It’s a slightly more
skilled job and may even pay better than working as a regular cashier.
"Universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than
the universal ability to read and write would result in a
full-employment economy of book publishing."

But it’s a temporary position: Soon enough, consumers will be as
proficient at self-checkout as they are at getting cash from the bank
machine, and the self-checkout tutor will be unnecessary. By then,
digital tagging technology may have advanced to the point where shoppers
just leave stores with the items they want and get billed automatically.

For the moment, we’ll need more of those specialists than we’ll be able
to find—mechanics to fit our current cars with robot drivers, engineers
to replace medical staff with sensors, and to write software for postal
drones. There will be an increase in specialized jobs before there's a
precipitous drop. Already in China, the implementation of 3-D printing
and other automated solutions is threatening hundreds of thousands of
high-tech manufacturing jobs, many of which have existed for less than a
decade.

American factories would be winning back this business but for a
shortage of workers with the training necessary to run an automated
factory. Still, this wealth of opportunity will likely be only
temporary. Once the robots are in place, their continued upkeep and a
large part of their improvement will be automated as well. Humans may
have to learn to live with it.

High-Tech Unemployment

This conundrum was first articulated back in the 1940s by the

[LINK] NBN still grappling with inaccurate housing data

[David Boxall]

Excuses, excuses. ;)

Anyone who's worked with legacy data will recognise the issues.

At the time, Morrow was standing in front of three premises in a 
semi-rural area on the outskirts of Redcliffe that NBN could only 
serve with fibre-to-the-premise connections, at a cost of $120,000.


The three premises could not be served with NBN's preferred 
fibre-to-the-node due to the prohibitive cost of constructing 
facilities to power them ($200,000).


--
David Boxall|  Drink no longer water,
|  but use a little wine
http://david.boxall.id.au   |  for thy stomach's sake ...
|King James Bible
|  1 Timothy 5:23

___
Link mailing list
Link@mailman.anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link