Toward a World that Works for Everyone
Pre-AI Automation Re: Joe Wilkins,”Tech Workers, Long Treated Like Aristocracy, Are Now Human Waste,” Futurism, May 18, 2026, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2026/05/21/from-darkness-unto-light-21-may-2026-update/. I’m having a flashback to 1982, when millions of workers were laid off and promised a rehire, only not to be rehired. It was the first ever jobless recovery. Corporations shed countless numbers of […]
In the 1960s, the hippies or flower children saw the possibility of an awakened society. The Fifth Dimension was singing “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Findhorn was going. David Spangler published his Revelation: The Birth of a New Age; Marilyn Ferguson, her Aquarian Conspiracy. Intentional communities were popping […]
Lights out! I was just about to do more work on this article, which I had entitled, “What Did Us in was Automation and Outsourcing.” … And I felt I couldn’t let the article go out like that. That’s only part of the truth. The most important element is left out. It should read: “What […]
I think the only way one could be a Trump hater today is if one has a financial stake in crippling his work to drain the swamp – or is hypnotized by mainstream news. He didn’t come made to my specifications. He came with what it took to do the job. And, by gosh, […]
(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.) “Restructuring” – I.e., Downsizing – is the Answer “What is a computer for, if not to save labor?” (Jim Steinhart, “Database Octopus,” Canadian Datasystems, May 1991, 58.) “Theoretically every time you make a $10,000 investment on technology you should have replaced one employee.” (James Miller, CEO of Royal Trustco […]
In the 1980s and 1990s, the fate of our children was sealed. Everyone was automating. They intended to save $10,000 a machine in manpower replaced. (1) They regarded obsolete labor as expendable. No plan was made to compensate the displaced for loss of job and in many cases career. Gone were the “permanent” jobs […]
Allow me, if you would, to meander through some observations as they arise. Loosely connected, I hope. But just allowing. Returning to the point I’ve been making about spectrums (or spectra, if you like), (1) I’ve been locating behavior on a spectrum between two extremes – one positive, the other negative – or in the […]
I’ve long missed the influence of what we in the 1970s called the “human growth movement” or the “human potential movement.” It revolved around what enlightened psychologist John Enright called “awareness, responsibility, and communication.” I’d like to kickstart it again, if it were in my power to do so. No matter what’s happening outside, […]
I wish you could have been with me, reading the trade journals in the ’90s on automation. I’ve told the story before of the realization I had one day that automation was eroding the job market. (1) Rushed into press: The Impact of Automation on Work at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Impact-of-Automation-on-Work-2.pdf I still have a few boxes of […]
I have a young friend who’s like a granddaughter to me and through her I’ve been able to meet many 25-36-year-olds. Their situation is very sad. They’re entirely willing. And they have ideas. But they’re the kind of ideas that reflect their situation. Their situation is a lack of opportunities. Automation took most work […]
2023: So here we are, in the automated future of our dreams. Where robots do the “dirty jobs” and we all benefit. Or do we? Did we all benefit from the orgy of automation that took place in the late 20th century and continues today? Did wealth flow down, or even trickle down, to the […]
I’d like to repost this article from 2011 to accompany “Why Are Our Kids Living with Us?” If your child is unable to find a decent-paying job, this article may explain why. My first “awakening,” if you like, came in 1991 as I and my wife were driving through a favorite semi-rural section of British […]
I began my career as a historian examining how late-Victorian authors in English Canada represented the process of growth. (1) They believed in something contemporary historians came to call “creative repression”: We grow by denying ourselves. The body was seen as a fixed energy system. If we wasted our energy physically, we’d pay for it […]
(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.) (From “Automation and Business Darwinism,” at https://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/travel2.html) In order to provide a snapshot of the automation of work, I chose to study a corporate travel magazine during the years 1996 to 1998 — the Business Travel News or BTN. Trade magazines like it are all that are available to a […]
The work I’m doing now, around the Four Point Plan, (1) is a direct result of my work around the inroads of automation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a time of blue screens and DOS commands. We had the novelty of computer games. Every day at 4:00 the office fell silent […]
