"Companies increasingly divide their work forces into a core group of permanent, well-paid employees surrounded by less-skilled, lower-wage workers who can be brought in and sent away as demand fluctuates." NY Times. It it easy to imagine how this could polarize society further, effectively starving out the middle class. "The Rise of The Creative Class" argues for a positive interpretation, in that more people will want to work in loosely coupled networks to get variety. That our identity will increasingly be derived from the type of work we do, not the company we work for. As in the middleage. For a vision of the future, read W. Gibsons "Neuromancer". Big companies, weak nations and people living in worlds apart.
Meanwhile, I shall continue my dissertation work of moving aspects of human decision-making into the corporate hieve-techno mind, contributing to the transformation of the economy.
A New Humanism
Here's a quote from a 1992 essay, "The Emerging Third Culture". "In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost. " In a follow-up from 2002 the author, John Brockman, goes on to note "Ten years later, that fossil culture is in decline" and ignites an interesting discussion on the modern scientists. At the Edge website and in the book "The New Humanists: Science At the Edge".
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