Industry without Industry

Last night I heard a comment about economics -- definitely not one of my usual areas of interest -- that really made me think. It was an observation that as populations of industrialized countries continue to grow, there is less for everyone to do, work-wise, because of technology. I suppose it was a similar situation in the first few decades of the industrial revolution, although it probably wasn't as big an issue for a few reasons. First of all, many of the machines of that era required contined human operation, as opposed to programming and maintenance. Secondly, there weren't as many people, even though the population growth rate was much higher. While the population rate is still soaring in undeveloped countries, in industrialized countries it's remained relatively constant since the early 1980s and is projected to remain so throughout 2050. This "even keel" is good news and bad news, for reasons that are more complicated than I want to get into here. In a nutshell, the concern of too many people and too little work will be a worsening problem until we have negative population growth rates, and really until several generations after the first children are born into that age of negative growth.

So what will happen to all of these people without work? There will still be Industry -- in the larger sense of companies and businesses -- but there will not be much industry -- as in individual productivity. As more and more business processes become automated, should we all become engineers? What happens when everything is programmed and only a handful of workers (relatively speaking) are needed to maintain the systems? Will we experience a reverse-technology trend, kind of an apocalyptic world of simplicity with people either moving to areas of the world that are less developed or setting up pockets of "non-civilization" that will allow them to function and be productive? Of course, there are such pockets now, but they are small, far apart, and poorly organized. In a weird way, this all ties in with the "tiny house revolution" I wrote about last week.

I have no idea what will happen to the workers, from the highest to lowest levels. Technology is overtaking almost every field I can think of, with one notable exception: the arts. Computers may be capable of reproducing the technical aspects of drawing, writing, photography, and so on, but they will never be able to fully capture the heart of art. Maybe someday we will have a world where art is the most exalted profession, for that very reason. It's interesting to think about.