Page 28 - digitalliteracy

1.3 How Technology Has Transformed the Way We Work

In 1995 Jeremy Rifkin, who has writ-
ten extensively on the impact of sci-
entific and technological changes on
society, published a book titled The End

of Work, in which he argued that com-
puters would eliminate jobs on a mas-
sive scale. In one sense Rifkin was right;
computers have eliminated many jobs.
However, another writer, Lars Svend-
sen (2008), noted that computers are
both a threat and a liberator. They can
process boring, dull, monotonous work
more efficiently than humans and free
shironosov/iStock/Thinkstock
us up to use our minds for more cre-
New technology has created many jobs and new
ative, exciting types of work.
types of work that would never have existed without
the shift toward the digital age.
Some people’s fears that computers
would eventually replace people in the
workforce have not come to fruition. In fact, after Rifkin’s book was published, more than
20 million new jobs were created between 1995 and 2008 in the United States alone (Svend-
sen, 2008). The Bay Area Council Economic Institute showed that between 2001 and 2011,
technology jobs (those most closely related to science, technology, engineering, and math-
ematics) grew 27 times faster than other occupations. Each new high-tech job also resulted
in 4.3 other new jobs, including support positions, lawyers, dentists, schoolteachers, cooks,
retail clerks, and others (Bay Area Council Economic Institute, 2015). So far, technology has
created far more jobs than it has destroyed. Many of these jobs, such as web designers, game
developers, and instructional designers, did not exist before the advent of computer technol-
ogy. Your college education will prepare you for other, new jobs that may not yet exist.

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