In a jobless recovery, innovators will have jobs
The economy is recovering, or so the economists tell us. The employment picture remains grim, however, and high levels of joblessness may be a permanent condition, according to a recent item in The Huffington Post (Reference 1) by Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, computer engineer, and author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- EDN, March 4, 2010
The economy is recovering, or so the economists tell us. The employment picture remains grim, however, and high levels of joblessness may be a permanent condition, according to a recent item in The Huffington Post (Reference 1) by Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, computer engineer, and author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.
Ford begins with a look at an article in Salon, “Why Dilbert is doomed: The jobs of tomorrow are not what you’d expect” (Reference 2). That article predicts that the stable jobs of tomorrow will be those that cannot be automated–those that require creativity or proximity, with proximity including health care and education. Ford says, however, that neither health care nor education is immune to automation. Online education is becoming commonplace, and expert systems can perform many health-care tasks.
Ford describes an employment pyramid with a few skilled professionals and entrepreneurs at the top; the vast majority below the apex performs routine, repetitive tasks. Automation, he says, will consume the entire base of the job-skills pyramid. People in that base must move up or leave.
He doubts that most people will have the ability to move up. He adds that people with the creativity, talent, or personality traits to be successful writers, performers, and commissioned sales people exhibit a power-law income distribution, which leads to drastic income inequality.
Ford sees a future of job sharing and income supplementation for most people. He echoes Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California—Davis. “The economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills and technology’s role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator,” Clark has noted (Reference 3).
Where do engineers stand in this picture? Engineering is not immune to automation. I’ve written much over the past few months about the model-based design tools and hardware-in-the-loop tests that drastically reduce the amount of time-consuming low-level programming and hardware prototyping that engineers must do (Reference 4). To stay at the top of Ford’s employment pyramid, engineers must exploit the new tools available to them to develop products that represent significant innovation and creativity. Marginal improvements won’t cut it.
In this special section, we profile five engineering teams who have pushed to stay at the apex of the job-skills pyramid during 2009: the Intrinsity Cortex-A8 FastCore team, the MontaVista Software Real-Fast Linux team, the Numonyx Alverstone Phase-Change-Memory team, the Synopsys DesignWare SuperSpeed USB 3.0 IP team, and the Xilinx Virtex-6/Spartan 6 team.
EDN editors have selected these teams as finalists for Innovator of the Year in our annual Innovation Awards program. We encourage you to peruse their stories and cast an online ballot for your favorite at www.edn.com/innovation20. More important, though, we hope their stories will serve as inspiration as you hone your innovation skills and remain at the top of Ford’s employment pyramid throughout 2010 and beyond.
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as far as engineering automation, i'm working that problem from multiple fronts;after having cross trained into MS .NET from previous layoff, I have successfully provided MS .NET deliverables which contain MS .NET GUI, i/o connection to device under test, test fixture interfaces, and electronic test equipment. My approach to providing a higher level of automation;
1. currently building .net based tools for remote control of test equipment including sql server database and provide extended functionality of said equipment to increase potential ROI.
2. proposing such tools to the major equipment OEMs and OEM vendors as 3rd party control applications(where clients will pay at least an order of magnitude LESS for h/w and s/w deliverables than the monopolizing huge competitor currently charges)
--my two cents--
DotNetGuy - 2010-13-4 17:06:00 PDT -
I don't know when this Utopia will come to life but it's not any time soon. For now the top of the pyramid consists of bean counters who promote other bean counters etc. If anything, they are terified of creativity and use their power to smother it.
DA - 2010-10-3 20:01:00 PST -
The same thing was said when assembly line manufacturing was developed and displaced worker in the early 20th century. The only thing worth noting is the basic premise that innovation leads the way to fertile new pastures. Innovators have always fared well no matter the economy. Yet that is, or should be, common sense to engineers.
Please, if you want to find something worth writing about, stop referencing leftist websites like the Huffington Post and Salon. You can't get ahead following lemmings.
tell me something new - 2010-8-3 10:19:00 PST -
I'm missing a very important text in the References section: "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Francis Walker - 2010-6-3 11:55:00 PST
