Technological Unemployment - How it Effects our World

Imagine for a moment…

It’s 6AM, and your alarm clock has gone off like clockwork (like it does each and every morning).

Your day has begun with the preparation of breakfast and lunch for your two daughters, before dropping them off at school and heading to your job at one of the local manufacturing facilities. In keeping with a routine that you’ve mastered over the years, you catch a series of buses, maneuvering around others on your commute to find one of the sparsely available seats. When you finally get to your plant, your shift is called into a meeting right away.

It’s then that you learn that half of the shift’s manpower will be laid off due to plant restructuring. Suddenly, the routine that you had spent years following is violently disrupted, and you feel yourself breaking into a cold sweat. You wonder what to tell your family and how to pay your bills. Most importantly however – you wonder what comes next. This is the reality that workers in countries all over the world are facing as machines and digital technology displace the jobs historically held by working men and women. This is the reality of technological unemployment.

Now put yourself in this scenario, where the decision of what to do next is yours – what do you do first? You aren’t trained for any profession other than the one that you’ve spent years working in, and you weren’t expecting to be job hunting. You can’t spend years of time and tens of thousands of dollars going back to school to acquire a new skill, only to compete with people who have more industry experience than you have. To make things worse; you don’t have the savings necessary to prolong this decision indefinitely.

As technological advancement continues to automate functions that were once manpowered, more and more people are finding themselves in a limbo between the careers that are being displaced, and the careers that are being created for those that design the technology. These people are lacking a path to the one thing that they all need – economic empowerment.

This is a unique time in our world, where the internet is creating a communication framework that transcends historical barriers of geography, language and cultural differences. The world is poised to come together and find the solutions to technological unemployment, using the opportunities presented to us by global communication networks. Central to this opportunity is the growing percentage of the world’s population with access to mobile smart phones and mobile broadband. Even with this quantum leap in connectivity – many people in are still in search of economic empowerment, with half of the world still living on less than two dollars a day.

This is why now, more than ever, an idea like that of the empowr platform (www.empowr.com) is best positioned to address technological unemployment, by giving everyone with an internet connection, access to a global network of economic opportunity.

By coming together in the first democratic social economy, together we are working towards bridging the divide of economic displacement, and the staggering pace of technological advancement. We are progressing towards being part of an economy that doesn’t discriminate based on seniority in a position or board room politics – where everyone has a truly free and equal opportunity to earn and get ahead. Upon achieving such progress, we will no longer have to feel limited by the need to retrain or acquire new skills to keep pace with economic changes: we will be part of an economy where the education system that drives our productivity is free and available to anyone who is willing to take advantage of it. So, given that you are still in this scenario: how would this influence your decision about ‘what to do first’?

Thanks to the information age, you no longer have to face the false choice of being shackled to an industry of routine, or racing tirelessly behind the winds of technological progress. Thanks to a socially connected world and those who would use it to solve real world issues, we have a historic opportunity to experience true freedom through a marrying of technology and economic empowerment. So to the empowr citizens, I ask: what do you see as the biggest challenge in an advancing economy and how do you think we as empowr citizens can address it?

Marcus A. Bradley is the President of the empowr Democratic Social Economy. Democratically elected by the platform's community of citizens, Marcus now leads the empowr software company in San Diego CA.