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Stefan Claudiu
The Zeitgeist Movement - Orientation Guide
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Americans employed in the
service
industries went from 59% to 82%27. For the last 50 years, the
service
sector
has been absorbing the job losses from Agriculture and Manufacturing. Unfortunately, this pattern is slowing fast as
computerized
automation takes hold. From 1983-1993, banks cut 37% of their human tellers, and by the year 2000, 90% of all bank customers used teller machines (ATMs)28. Business phone operators have almost all been replaced by
computerized
voice answering systems, post office tellers are being replaced by self-
service
machines, while cashiers are being replaced by
computerized
kiosks. McDonalds, for example, has been talking about full automation of its restaurants for many years now, introducing Kiosks to replace the front of house staff, while using automated cooking tools, such as burger flippers, for the back of house staff29. The fact that they haven't done so is likely a public relations issue, for they know how many jobs would be cut in the event they did automate. There isn't one area of the Service Industry that isn't being affected by
computerized
automation. In fact, if one was to think creatively about the application of technology that currently exists, but is not yet applied to the
service
sector
, it is easy to see how, almost overnight, the majority of all
service
jobs could be phased out today, starting with tellers, cashiers, waiters, and phone operators. Economist Stephen Roach has warned:
"The
service
sector
has lost its role as America's unbridled engine of job creation."30
As this transition occurs, where is the emerging new
sector
to employ all the newly displaced workers? There really isn't one...at least not yet. While there are many specialized fields emerging in the Information realm, they are extremely limited in their ability to offer anything close to compensation for the vast job loss on the horizon. And while economists struggle to create models to deal with this issue of nearly unstoppable unemployment, ranging from the government subsidization of labor (welfare) to novel notions such as a `negative income tax', most refuse to consider what is really needed in order to prevent total chaos on this planet. The solution lies not in attempting to `fix' the issues that have emerged, but rather it is time we transcend the system in its entirety... for the system of monetary exchange, along with Capitalism itself, is now completely obsolete in the wake of technological creativity. Summary of Chapter 2: The Monetary System of the world is nothing more than a game. It has little basis in reality. It emerged thousands of years ago when scarcity of resources was an everyday problem. People back
27 28
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2002-12-12-manufacture_x.htm Retooling Lives, Vision 2000 p. 43 29 http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030801/1345236_F.shtmls 30 Interview, 3/15/94 noted in The End of Work (by Jeremy Rifkin), p. 143 32
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