Suppose we are in a once every few hundred years massive societal change driven by information technology. We have been thinking this for at least the last 20 years or so. We have already seen a few waves of job transfers from manual to knowledge workers and of white collar repetitive jobs becoming automated.
Are the latest waves of financial crises exacerbated by the speed of information travel? What will that mean as the speed of information travel continues to go faster and include more dimensions? The stock market graphs of the last 10 years look remarkably different than all that came before with huge, spikey mountains and valleys. Seems that someone says something on one side of the world and a stock market on the other side of the world reacts within minutes... or seconds.
And have a somewhat permanent 10% of the US work force been cut. "Permanent" at least in the sense of until enough time passes for lots of re-training and re-education. Is the volatility of world financial markets another symptom of the kind of stress seen around major societal shifts?
If we are in fact accelerating our progression toward a time where everything that an be automated will be automated and our value is much more determined by how creative we are rather than how much quantity of work we can do, what does that mean for most of today's current work force?
Will we evolve into a more highly conscious, creative species overall? Will there be more separation between the haves and have nots, where the haves are represented by those who learn to be artists?
Fast forward 50, 100 years and how will we expect the societal landscape to change analagous to the changes we saw over 200 years ago from a monarchical, agricultural, rural society into a relatively democratic, industrial and urban society? What are the parallels and differences both in how we live physically, how we think and how we behave?
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