New Geography

Author: Robert Argento

  • Postmodernity: Will Another Bite from the Apple Help?

    The visionary evangelical zeal of Steve Jobs lured me from my   cozy philosophical pursuits at Barry University in south Florida to the frenetic gyrations of 1980s Silicon Valley. Jobs’ incantations held me spellbound with his revelation of an Information Revolution that would not only democratize the entire world, but would inevitably and infallibly take a bite out of every apple that stood in the way of humanity’s own paradise.

    I would later come to dub this techno-omnipotence "Her Highness Technology." After the Dot Com Dot Bomb of March 2000, however, I came to refer to the whole Valley scene as just "sillyConValley." Now, let’s fast forward some thirteen years to 2013 and see what’s up…

    iPads that take dictation! Location-based services that guide you to the nearest Italian restaurant! And soon, we are promised, human-computer interfaces that respond to your needs even before you speak, tap, or click. With all this going on it would only be natural to expect that the priesthood of the high-tech self-proclaimed digital Mecca of Silicon Valley   would surely devise a host of dazzling techno-wizardries to conquer whatever ills are ailing America, all the way from here to Eternity. To question the omnipotence of Her Highness Technology or her saving graces would be a matter of heresy against new age orthodoxy. Even so, I am willing to stick my neck out and risk excommunication from Techno-Paradise and do just that. Why not?  

    So, not discounting the remarkable accomplishments of the past hundred years, there are some nagging developments that would seem to signal that we are approaching some kind of tipping point—where three steps forward over here are confounded by three steps backward over there. Have a look, now, at some social, economic and political illustrations where even the most glittering technologies failed to deliver the expected end results. 

    Jobs Crisis or Jobs’ Crisis?

    Her Highness Technology has been performing more and more of the work that we used to do. This was once the chief selling point for the industrial revolution: washer plus dryer equals more leisure time for everyone. But now our labor-saving fantasies are turning into a daily nightmare for millions of lately obsoleted workers. In China, they’re even replacing—note "replacing," not helping—waiters with robots. Can it be that Steve Jobs’ revolution is now contributing to a Jobs Crisis?

    For sure, major innovations like Jobs’ Apple II and Macintosh once created a plethora of breathtaking career opportunities, along with personal empowerment. Perhaps another such game changer might come along. But absent that, new technologies will likely extend the trend of the last ten years: creating splendid career opportunities for fewer and fewer while diminishing job opportunities for more and more.

    Looking forward, most advanced technologies like AI, quantum computing, and nanotech robotics are sure to put more and more professional, skilled, and semi-skilled people out of work. Their only hope might be to merge themselves with their technology, as presently being prototyped in Alzheimer’s patients and military volunteers.  Make way for "Homo Sapiens 2.0?"

    Global Democracy or Ersatz Democracy?

    Working as a manager at Xerox LiveWorks during the rise of the Internet, I uncritically promoted Steve Jobs’ utopian vision of electronic democracy. All my fellow engineers, on the other hand, ardently insisted "Forget about it!" Computerized balloting, they warned, is 180 degrees out of phase with old-fashioned paper balloting. Why? While paper ballot processing is transparent to anyone who can count, computerized ballot processing is transparent to no one except the software proprietor. To be authentic, however, democracy requires a transparent ballot process.  

    Since its implementation, opaque computerized elections have yielded the widest discrepancies ever between the "official count" and many exit polls—historically the most accurate predictor of who actually won the election. While technology is not inherently anti-democratic, it is not inherently democratic either; and just because we can computerize anything does not mean we must computerize everything.

    On the bright side of computerization, social media do represent a potential force for democratization by enabling peoples’ movements across national, religious, and racial boundaries, and with a speed and facility never before thought possible. How about global consumer unions that patronize only those vendors that meet published standards of acceptance? Every time you shop, you’re voting: that’s effective participative democracy.

    Education crisis: "No amount of technology will make a dent."—Steve Jobs

    In 1996, when asked what should be done about education’s gradual slide into mediocrity, technology evangelist Jobs cautioned "What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology…The problems are sociopolitical." And he’s right.

    For thousands of years Egyptian mathematicians, Greek philosophers, Roman architects and British engineers solved complex geometry problems, were literate in multiple languages, built durable bridges and aqueducts, and designed powerful internal combustion engines—with not much more than "paper and pencil" or a slide rule. Today, after thirty years of computerization and the Internet, our high school graduates can barely compose a complete sentence in their native language and don’t even know why we celebrate the Fourth of July. The problem is not technical. It has to do with basic human nature and the need for discipline, focus, integrity and commitment—traditionally the stuff of good parenting. (Hint: Less time twittering equals more time for studying.)

    Computerized Government: Digital Deliverance or Digital Disaster?

    When I arrived in Silicon Valley in the mid-1980s California had a strong billion state surplus and was the ninth largest economy in the world. By 2004, after computerizing the government, the state had accumulated a $22 billion debt. Apparently, all the $billions they had put into computers, databases, servers, web applications, and middleware was not able to offset the mismanagement of state budgeting, population growth, and a rapidly globalizing (and digitizing) economy.

    And the feds? Well, since digitizing the entire government under Clinton and Bush, federal debt has only gotten much worse. Why? Because balanced budgeting is not so much a technical problem; it’s mostly a matter of good arithmetic and basic integrity. For example, following computerization, we saw Rumsfeld report $2.3 trillion unaccounted for in Pentagon spending.   Before digitized "friction-free capitalism" (Bill Gates, The Road Ahead) a loss that stupendous was not only unthinkable, it was not even technically possible!

    US Trade Deficit

    This is largely a matter of importing more than we export, or consuming more than we produce—a likely result of globalization and too much offshoring of manufacturing. SCM (supply chain management) and other high-tech e-commerce software have only greased the rails for US corporations to outsource and offshore more operations, which ultimately translates to increased imports. While the US continues to lead the world in arms and pharmaceuticals exports, our leading imports are now those things everybody needs for everyday life.   Americans must either go back to manufacturing real products for everyday consumption, or shrink consumption—or both. New technology exports won’t help much, since after invention and productization most of the operations are soon offshored.

    Maybe Biting the Apple Never was the Way to Paradise

    The US was once a world leader in manufacturing, exports, agriculture, education and trade surplus—all without iPads, laptops, social media, cell phones, high-speed computer trading, or computerized derivatives. And also without ponderous debt or a jobs crisis.

    Of course, only a Luddite would reject all mechanized or computerized technology. It is equally true that only an overreaching religious zealot would tenaciously hold to the credo: "Her Highness Technology Über Alles!" Even Steve Jobs backed off of that one.

    Technology is very good at solving many problems. Transforming human nature is not one of them. People still cheat, steal, lie, shade the truth in their favor, betray, enslave, bomb, torture, and murder—only now it’s at light speed. This wanton behavior has been going on since Adam bit the apple and lost paradise. Can technology rehabilitate the human situation? While transhumanists insist "Yes", history emphatically says "No."   

    The quandaries of post-modern—some say posthuman—civilization are not essentially technical in nature and do not fit neatly into a technical solution. The errant human condition and its predicament is essentially spiritual in nature and calls for a spiritual remedy—one ordered under a combination of proven virtues and a serious dose of transcendent Wisdom. Without this, all the science, technology and bitten apples in the whole universe are more likely to lead us to Kidron Valley than back to Eden. 

    Rob Argento is a senior technical writer and project leader with a background in aerospace engineering and some 18 years in Silicon Valley with Oracle, Xerox, Microsoft, and Sony. His broad industry experience includes NASA, e-commerce, US Navy, Biotech, and PC Games. He has degrees in physics and theological studies.

    Shanghai photo by flickr user acaben

  • Rob Argento – Technical Communications Consultant

  • Globalization: Too Many Americans Are Dropping Under the Radar

    By the time I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1986 California’s middle class economy was already being remade by globalization. Globalization’s dramatic impact on northern California hit me square in the face the moment I arrived at my first career expo later that year at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara. There I found myself surrounded by a multitude of H‑1B workers from all over the world, excitedly speaking in a myriad of languages. I was staggered. Born in the U.S.A., I felt like a foreigner in the land of my birth.  

    In this new Pacific Rim "promised land," an American-born engineer residing in Palo Alto would need four or five times his annual salary to purchase the same home his father had gotten with only two. Valley infrastructure was not keeping up with the expanding population and the inevitable supply-demand dynamic was rapidly dividing the middle class into winners and losers. The winners would enjoy at least a 4-bed/3-bath/2-car home and early retirement; the losers would compete for tiny 1-bed condos. This trend has not only continued but is escalating across a variety of benchmarks—both in the Valley and all over America.

    Now, let’s get close to the ground and see if we can find who’s been dropping under the radar.

    Some Are Hot, But Most Americans (Particularly White Males) Are Not

    Half of Silicon Valley’s technology workforce is now Asian, and many come from abroad. This was already the case among software development engineers back in 1990 when I was working for Consilium. Hispanics, Latinos, and African-Americans are all losing ground, though not as quickly as whites.

    US taxpayers have unknowingly funded a training program called JEEP to train foreign Asian students for jobs in some booming career fields such as offshore call centers that serve US businesses. As a result, according to Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York), American workers have lost some five hundred thousand jobs in just five years.

    Last November figures obtained from inside IBM seemed to indicate that for the first time more of the tech giant’s workforce would be employed in India than in the US. Of IBM’s total global workforce of 430,000 less than one quarter now work in the US. IBM benefits from the hefty difference in employee salaries, which can amount to as much as $100,000 per year.

    All this cost-cutting from H-1B work visas, outsourcing, and offshoring is having a leveling impact on US wages, including among technology specialists such as software development engineers and project managers—even though new technology developments continue at a breathtaking pace.

    Age-Related Losers, Old and Young

    When I arrived, you could see how youth-obsessed 80s Silicon Valley was. It still is, only more so. In her article Silicon Valley’s Dirty Secret: Age Bias, Sarah McBride details a number of cases of age-related bias that show how much tougher it is for the over-40 techie to find her next job than for the 20s person, even from another country. I know Age-bias first-hand. One day in 2002, while a technical writer for startup E2open, I was confronted by two young  engineers: "What’s an over-40 dude doing here—aren’t you retired yet?"

    It’s not just Silicon Valley anymore. A 2012 United States GAO report noted that   "…long-term unemployment has particularly serious implications for older workers (age 55 and over). Job loss for older workers threatens not only their immediate financial security, but also their ability to support themselves during retirement."

    Think you’re too young to worry about age? Think again. Even pretty young women might not be quite good enough in the brave new world. In 2011, clothing giant H&M reported that they are now using "perfect" virtual models—not real humans—for their online shopping site.

    Globalization’s Broadband Impact on America

    In The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine (Aug. 2011) highlights the particularly devastating impact on the American male worker.

    • "The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s."
    • "The portion of men holding a job—any job, full or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July 2012."
    • "These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948."
    • "Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs."
    • "To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job."
    • "After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent"…putting them "back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s."

    In Race Against the Machine (2011) MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee show how jobs formerly enjoyed by the median US worker are now being lost to cutting-edge technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to today’s white collar STEM worker what robotics was to many blue collar workers.   We were already advancing this trend at Oracle in 1990 with the development of our SQL*Forms application generator, obviating the need for thousands of application developers.

    A number of disturbing statistics indicate that US workers are now both producing and earning less.
    The Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook ranks the United States 11th in the world in GDP per capita. We used to be number 1. This figure indicates that while rich Americans keep getting ever richer, the middle class is producing less and less per capita. The US-born middle class worker keeps on sinking.

    A recent National Employment Law Project report indicates that the current "recovery" continues to be slanted toward low-paying jobs, reinforcing the mounting inequality s. The fastest growing low-wage jobs include retail salespeople, food prep workers, waiters and waitresses, laborers and freight workers, office clerks and customer representatives, and personal and home care aides—mostly paying median hourly wages between $7.69 and $13.83 per hour. Is this America’s new path to "prosperity?"

    The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports, amazingly, that the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low-wage work than any other major industrialized nation:

    The Future: Dimmest for the Brightest, Brightest for the Dimmest?

    Last year a NY Times article covered the appalling plight of recent college grads. Half of today’s graduates are jobless or underemployed. They are more likely to be employed in jobs not requiring a college diploma—such as receptionists, cashiers and food-service helpers—than as engineers, physicists, or computer professionals.

    And while Americans are busy paying for US corporations to move work to Asia, US federal employment accounts for the entire net increase in jobs since at least 2008. Washington’s cure to de-industrialization of the US has been to expand government payrolls. But is the creation of more and more "security" jobs and unnecessary bureaucracy the proper cure for persistent unemployment and swelling welfare rolls?

    Where Do We Go From Here?

    All of the benchmarks point to the unavoidable conclusion that ever more Americans are simply dropping under the economic radar screen. This includes some very broad downtrends for American workers of all races; "older" workers; young workers who perform work that robotics and AI are learning to do more cost-effectively; the American male workforce and  middle income workers in general; and even recent college graduates. With neither the free market or   government helping very much the message seems quite clear: globalization’s losers must get organized and work together for improved economic opportunity.

    Rob Argento is a senior technical writer and project leader with a background in aerospace engineering and some 18 years in Silicon Valley with Oracle, Xerox, Microsoft, and Sony. His broad industry experience includes NASA, e-commerce, US Navy, Biotech, and PC Games. He has degrees in physics and theological studies.

    Global population photo by Bigstock.