The only way to stay ahead of the curve is by constant self-improvement.
I feel in todays world many people are slow to realize that they need to get more technical. It's not like there isn't "jobs" or "work" that needs to be done, it's just smarter, more technical work, with no clear-cut answers due to the ever increasing amounts of data we can collect and process. Think about it like this: "Programming skills in 2010s are the Excel skills of the 1990s".
that's not an answer for the majority of population, when the pace of good job destruction is faster than good job creation.
no doubt, there's now plenty of opportunity for tech-workers, who will profit from the process (at least as long as their jobs don't get automated away, too). but the wages are already stagnant also in this sector - when the entry of new workers will undercut current engineers' negotiating position (and it will, as engineering becomes the only safe-heaven on the labour market), they will gradually face similar fate as the rest of the workers. the real winners of automation are the owners of capital.
Until AI that's comparable to a human brain is invented (which I don't see coming in the next 100 years), there will be an ever increasing number of problems to be solved by humans, and as a result, an ever increasing number of opportunities for humans in all sorts of industries.
Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education which is becoming more and more widely accessible due to cheap technology and Internet access. Viewing people as "below average" or "above average" is a very pre-deterministic way of evaluating any person's potential :).
> Everyone can choose the path of self-improvement and self-education.
You are aware you've just posited free will? I think that's such a significant claim that it needs some sort of support. Because things like family education level and income seem highly determining for lifetime outcomes - in a way that would seem to support the idea that free will doesn't exist.
Yes, I believe we've entered the era where almost anyone can learn anything, and self-educate himself. Things like educating oneself on the internet that were not possible only 5-15 years ago are becoming possible and much more easily accessible by many. It's possible that for many years majority people are not going to wake up that realization, like I said in my first comment, which is sad.
Any study you're going to look at that measures "lifetime outcome" (if you can measure such thing, is Nikola Tesla a bad outcome because he didn't have much money at the time he died?) will have to look at a span of 50 years at least. So a study done right now would have to start for people born around 1963 at best - a time very, very different from the world nowadays.
You said "determining" not "determined," but then you conclude with some absolute ontological statement about something-such not existing.
A: "Are you going to school tomorrow?"
B: "Well, statisticians tell me crime rates are incredibly high; so I probably won't make it to school. Why go, it might as well not exist?"
The point of A is lost — get an education. It's not all teet-sucking techno-commerce; those statistics say nothing about how peoples came to build those systems in the first place of which those [EDIT:] quantificational terms like "income level" describe.
Moreover, a revolution does not require that anyone die off, but that a system, or status quo, ends.
I don't think your sentences are analogous to mine.
The more data we get, the better we've been able to predict what people are going to do. Uncertainty reduces if you assume that people's choices are determined. But free will - what does that get you; what does that even look like as a prediction of the distribution of behaviour? It's an empty premise, like saying phlogestine.
The idea that everyone, many of whom have serious problems with motivation and the practical concerns of doing so, should or can just choose to educate their way into the workforce pays no attention to the difficulties faced by in doing so. It's a denial of the reality in which many people live and how they interact with that.
I do some charity work in my free time, many of people there can't even work out how to attach their CV to their job applications for god's sake. Many of them have serious mental problems. Many of them feel entitled to benefits. Many of them just have no motivation for any sort of learning - never really having seen benefits from it. They're not going to sit down and do umpteen years worth of self-education. Free will, choice, these are not serious answers to the sorts of problems that we face as a society.
Do you mean that if I choose the path of self-improvement and self-education, then I could realistically aspire to become a male cover model, even though I'm not especially handsome, or play for the Knicks, despite being a mere five-foot-eight? Whoa, that must be some path.
I feel in todays world many people are slow to realize that they need to get more technical. It's not like there isn't "jobs" or "work" that needs to be done, it's just smarter, more technical work, with no clear-cut answers due to the ever increasing amounts of data we can collect and process. Think about it like this: "Programming skills in 2010s are the Excel skills of the 1990s".