I saw this coming, the future will be unstable! The cause of this issue? Technology. The solution to this issue, a revolution in the way resources are distributed by society.
The first of these mega destabilizing events is a new technology called 'mobile VOIP.' A couple of days ago, Skype was released on the iPhone. Now people can made free calls to the entire world. Suddenly, AT&T, a fortune 20 firm, is worth a while lot less. In less than 5 years, this company will be worhtless, as Fon and Skype team up to made a hierarchical cellular service obsolete in urban areas. What about the more than 100,000 employees of AT&T? At some point in the near future, all these people will be jobless. I hope they own their house and have a lot saved, because they will all need to be retrained to work in another industry that will likly need to be very different.
The problem is that technological progress will change so rapidly these people will never be able to catch up. By the time they are trained to work in another industry, that one will be defunct due to a new technology.
At the same time, our capacity to produce will be greatly increased due to out advances in technology. So how do will we determine who is working hard enough to get a middle class salary when work is becoming increasingly unnecessary? I hope people learn to share, and quick, or else there is going to be an enormous number of people without the mean to support themselves.
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