Despite the massive changes we’ve seen in our personal lives from technology, the workplace has been remarkably static. Many of us still work in big offices, in cubicles, and at the same desk and computer every day.
Not for much longer.
The workplace of the future is going to be less centralized, more mobile, and more flexible than anything most people outside the startup and freelance economy have experienced before.
And the trend’s going to be accelerated by rapid uptake of mobile technology, economic volatility, and the global war for top talent.
People will need to have the right skills and knowledge to survive and have the capacity to work as a team with “machines” of incredible sophistication.
The result will be far less employment opportunities as such people/machine combinations will effectively and efficiently be capable of producing the products and services needed and wanted by society. Thus, private sector and government job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work will be further eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
In order to ensure that the economy operates most efficiently, productive capital must be broadly owned. This is because as technology advances, people cannot produce enough by labor alone to permit them to purchase everything that others produce with their productive capital assets. Logically, if productive capital is doing most of the work of production (the physical aspect of producing products and services), and private property includes the right to receive the income generated by what is owned, as labor becomes less productive (essentially less necessary when replaced or devalued by human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, biobotics, digital computerized operations, etc.) relative to productive capital, people who formerly relied on labor must shift to owning productive capital to carry out the work of production.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-the-workplace-slide-deck-2013-2
