The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.
Interpretation
The quote questions the feasibility of retraining displaced workers for high-tech jobs amidst automation.
Jeremy Rifkin's quote critiques the optimistic belief that workers displaced by automation in various sectors can easily transition to high-tech roles. He suggests that this perspective might ignore the practical challenges of retraining and the limited availability of job opportunities within the narrow confines of the high-tech industry, highlighting a disconnect between idealism and reality in labor market transitions.
In practice
In a seminar about the future of the workforce, this quote can be used to emphasize the challenges of retraining programs.
It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.
Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.
Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.
Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.
I've thought about what is an alternative word to feminism. There isn't one. It's a perfectly good word. And it can't be changed.
If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
Never have the nations of the world had so much to lose, or so much to gain. Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.
There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.
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