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Title
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Tomorrow's World of Work
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Author
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Keith Hudson, Futurologist
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Date Published
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October 2004
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Quite the most astonishing article that I've read in a very long time appeared in my mailbox yesterday, kindly sent by Frank Hample and cropped from The Scientist. Although it was written mainly for practising scientists, my rudimentary 45-years-old memories of industrial chemistry - and my current interest in genetics-enabled me to get the flavour of it.
This I will endeavour to summarise in three paragraphs for those on my private list who are not scientists and will not find it easy going. I also couple this article with another which appeared yesterday in a special Futurework Review in the Financial Times. Although the latter article is quite understable by any intelligent layman with only a nodding acquaintance with personal computers, both of the articles below would have been placed in the science fiction department only ten years ago. But both are realistic and can be extrapolated from with as much certainty as the sun's rays are about to penetrate the glass roof of the den in which I am now writing.
The first article is saying that chunks of DNA are now so easily and cheaply available by modern laboratory methods that students, researchers and innovators will be able to buy them and assemble them so that they can be used to construct almost anything they wish, subject to their own ingenuity-whether specific drugs or even physical objects. I oughtn't to have been astonished with this article because I've referred to this potentiality two or three times previously in my postings with specific reference to Carl Venter's and others' researchers into the possibility of using sun-powered bacteria in order to produce hydrogen-tomorrow's fuel when fossil resources become too expensive. Among many other avenues, Carl Venter, for example, is researching into the thousands of different sort of bacteria-hitherto unknown-that live in the top few inches of the sea. Anyway, what all those involved in synthetic genetics are after is to be able to specify lengths of DNA in which the action of each gene is precisely known-whether it's a direct "constructor" of a specific protein or the "progress chaser" or "sequencer" of other genes.
Putting these modules together will enable future genetic synthesisers to make almost anything that's desired and, coupled with chlorophyllic-type modules of DNA, will be able to be powered by solar radiation directly. In other words, the production of both fuel and also organic analogues of any imaginable consumer product will be possible pretty well anywhere on the earth's surface during daylight hours. (And, incidentally, this will also give hope to those people who live in countries and regions that are far from coastlines and are without cheap and easy access to sea transport and trading. At present, those countries have little hope of any sort of economic parity with countries with suitable seaports. In a DNA-based production future, such cultures will be able to produce anything they want.)
Considering the chemical complexity and the physical abilities of the human body, for example, or the strength of spider's web protein (hundreds of times stronger than the highest quality steel), then almost anything that we make today in factories will be able to be made locally by DNA methods. (And, for those who are worried, such DNA systems or products will not be able to escape into the larger environment any more than a car is able to escape from the production line in a factory. The precise manufacturing environment will constrain them. This will be quite different from the present relatively crude attempts of GM plant breeding firms.)
And, talking of factories, the second article below reminds us that the present phase of discontent and worry about the outsourcing of factory jobs to more cheaply-waged parts of the world such as China will prove to be but a fairly short one. Almost all of tomorrow's factories will be automated. Some factories already are. The only variable cost will be that of transporting the goods to customers in different parts of the world. By why do so when organic equivalents of our consumer products-just as strong, just as attractive, just as efficient-can be made in situ as and when required by local communities.
The second article also reminds us that today's and tomorrow's information technology means that, to all intents and purposes, individuals will be able to work together wherever they may be. Instead of "individuals" let me use communities or "work-home clusters" and instead of "work together" let me use "trade together". And what could be traded between "work-home clusters"? Recipes for DNA modules able to do this or that.
Cities will always have a future, particularly for the young who want to fnd partners or intellectuals who want to meet physically in order to discuss matters more subtley, orf even for exciting week-ends of jaded adults, but not as major employment or retail centres as now. If, as I believe certain, cities will gradually be forced out of existence by the high cost of commuting from the suburbs (just as city factories were originally pushed into existence by the cheapness of coal for steam power) so will increasing numbers of people (mainly middle-class at present) be returning to the countryside into what I term work-home clusters. Furthermore, all consumer goods and all automatable service jobs will be able to be done there. Trading will be mainly of information rather than physical products. Young people, once they have found their life partner in the universities and the cities will want to live in such countryside clusters for reasons of security and safety for their children, just as young Israelis return to their kibbutzim or Old Amish young people return to their communities once they have had a fling in the cities or army service.
There will be many other jobs than genetic synthesising and information trading between clusters. There's a host of personal service and environmental jobs, too, that can never be outsourced or automated. Furthermore, each work-home cluster will be able to satisfy our strong rank ordering propensities-whether of those who still remain ambitious at 30 years of age (when the frontal lobes of the brain have largely adapted to the immediate social culture) or those who are content with simply being an accepted member of the community. Respect and rank ordering can return to the community from whence they originally came and not be sidetracked by the cornucopia of variously-priced consumer goods which are presently used to denote status-and which keeps the present economic system going.
Tomorrow's economy will not depend on the lucky accident of finding quite a lot of fossil fuels which were very cheaply accessible but on our brains - as previously obtained for most of our existence hitherto -- 150 - 200,000 years? -- before our temporary 10,000 year diversion. This has really been only about 5 minutes in the ecological scheme of things.
Keith Hudson
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Title
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Working in the Park
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Author
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Keith Hudson, Futurologist
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Date Published
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July 2004
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The following article from the Financial Times describing a new business park in west London comes the closest to the sort of new work-home clusters that will inevitably develop as commuting costs into metropolises become too great for both individuals and the economy to bear.
Note, too, that there are one or two clues below that, even in what is probably a fairly high-tech business park, there are lower-skill jobs for others, too. I also saw some clues to the future in a village near Bath that I visited recently when looking for a new home. This is a village which, like most villages in England, has been through bad times in the last 50 years or so as it lost its school, its shops and all its young people to the cities.
But yet I had a feeling that prosperity was quietly creeping back to this village. There were several local lads in the pub and the skittle alley at the rear was obviously thriving. My better-half and I had been disappointed in the house we had come to see so we decided to look around to see what made the place tick.
It was a typical Cotswold village and there were many houses and farm buildings in sad condition with sagging roofs, crumbling stonework and overgrown yards. Yet there were other houses, such as the large rectory, that had been fully restored and there were big cars in their drives. (The village, although tucked away and hardly registering on the map, is not far from a motorway.) There were several close-by farms where the old barns were being modified into very attractive houses and apartments.
I suddenly realised that the young men I had seen in the pub who, until fairly recently, would have found no jobs in the village, were now being employed as gardeners, carpetners and builders. These are not high-skill jobs, it is true, but the men seemed to have more money in their pockets than their predecessors would have had 50 years ago as farm labourers. And then I found a couple of small office complexes tucked away in a farmyard with indications of some very high-tech work going on inside them.
This village reminded me of another similar one near here where a friend of mine works for a small 15-person firm in renovated farm buildings which does highly sophisticated programming work for the leading US and UK banks. The founder of the firm had decided some years ago that he wanted to live in a village and that's where he moved his firm. One by one, his staff decided to find a house nearby. And then, although the village was still a small one, the village shop revived. I've no doubt also that the firm was responsible for at least another job maintaining the premises. Here, as in the previous village, was a micro-example of John Maynard Keynes' 'multiplier' in action. (Where Keynes was wrong is that he thought economic multiplication by cash injection could spread sideways willy-nilly, but investments, innovations, skills, opportunities, status goods, etc, can only spread downwards.) Once the higher-skilled jobs become established, they will create others around them.
Well over a million people in England have left the cities and suburbs to live in villages in the last ten years. These are either rich, or fairly well-off middle-class people, and they are moving to the countryside for mainly aesthetic reasons at the presednt time. But about a fifth or a quarter of them (I would guess) are people who can work entirely, or for most days of the week, from their homes because of the internet.
They are not being pushed into the countryside. But gradually, others will be. Ideas of congestion traffic charges in the cities (following its success in London), and mileage-based tolling charges on all roads are already being seriously ventilated by quasi-governmental agencies in England (the government is too cowardly to propose them directly). Our roads, of course, are much more congested than in most countries but the mileage-based charges being proposed is indicative of the government's fears about future fuel costs, and these fears will be more widely felt in the coming years, even in relatively uncongested America.
British Telecom considers that several million jobs in England could now be done from home. (The biggest bond-trader in the world -- and one of its richest men -- an American whose name is hardly known [and which I have forgotten!] works from a PC and a bank of terminals in his basement.) I think we can much more clearly envisage the possibility of new work-home clusters in the suburbs and the countryside.
All this will not be because of nostalgic yearnings for a distant (and non-existent) golden past such as William Morris's News from Nowhere utopia but will be forced into existence by powerful forces -- as built environments always have been. I suggest that Chiswick Park is an attractive half-way step towards the next stage of modern civilisation.
Keith Hudson
