More mainstream information technology has already led to significant changes in the way companies are organized. We also focus on the controversial issue of foreign IT workers in the United States. Automation has been blamed for the loss of both manufacturing and white-collar jobs, as well as an increase in the length of the work week for salaried workers.
For example, in 1977 it took 35 person-hours to produce a car in the United States. Unlike the recession of the early 1980s, most of the people whose jobs were eliminated in the 1990s had at least some college education. In the past, shares of securities were bought and sold on the floors of stock exchanges by people appointed as floor brokers.
The number of hours worked per year in the United States is significantly higher than the number of hours worked in France or Germany. We can see an example of the "Protestant work ethic" in early New England history. In trying to build a personal AI, scientists would treat the personal AI they created as a tool for the purpose of increasing scientific knowledge.
It is important to note that the mainstream opinion in the artificial intelligence research community claims that the prospects of a personal AI being constructed are quite remote.
Workplace Changes
In this section, we explore some of the ways information technology is fundamentally changing the work experience. Information technology within corporations has reached the third stage with the creation of computer networks that connect different parts of the business. The common effect of the introduction of information technology is the flattening of organizational structures.
These companies have custom websites that have pre-configured systems tailored to the needs of the buyer. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 37 percent of workers in the United States telecommute at least one day per month [30]. The rapid growth in the number of teleworkers is proof that there are significant benefits to teleworking.
For example, a company that allows telecommuting can recruit employees who would otherwise not be interested in the job because they cannot or do not want to be within commuting distance of the headquarters. Telecommuters do not participate in the daily commute, saving energy and reducing pollution. Here are some of the most commonly cited reasons why companies discourage or prohibit telecommuting.
Even if employees telecommute only one or two days a week, many others in the organization can experience significant inconvenience. A quarter of UK companies have fired employees for inappropriate internet use. Sometimes monitoring can help an organization assess the quality of work performed by its employees.
Wages in India are significantly lower than in the United States or Western Europe. Therefore the creation of multinational teams is a way for companies to stay in business and preserve jobs in the United States [43]. About 90,000 IT-related jobs in the United States are moving abroad each year, and at US companies with revenues of at least $5 billion, about a quarter of IT jobs have already moved. offshore [44].
Globalization
The United States and other governments should not be subservient to the WTO. The WTO sets the rules for globalization, but no one elected it. Every member state, from the United States to the tiniest dictatorship, has one vote in the WTO. Authoritarian regimes such as the People's Republic of China can participate in the WTO even though they do not allow their workers to organize into unions.
Removing trade barriers also hurts workers in foreign countries. For example, NAFTA eliminated tariffs between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Most of them cannot find work in Mexico and end up immigrating to the United States [47]. Since the cost of labor is reduced to a fairly small fraction, it makes little difference whether the factory is located in China or the United States.
If you include products in transit, foreign factories hold more inventory than the same factories in the United States. In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the dot-com bust resulted in the loss of 13 percent of non-agricultural jobs, the worst decline since the Great Depression [50]. Even as hundreds of thousands of information technology workers lost their jobs, American companies hired tens of thousands of foreigners to work in the United States.
An H-1B visa allows a foreigner to work in the United States for up to six years. American companies use L-1 visas to move workers from overseas facilities to the United States for up to seven years. Employees brought into the United States under an L-1 visa are not required to be paid the prevailing wage.
Critics of L-1 visas claim that lower-wage foreign workers are displacing higher-wage American workers within the walls of high-tech facilities located in the United States. The US Congress has set no limit on the number of L-1 visas that can be issued each year, but the number of foreigners working in the United States on L-1 visas is far fewer than the number holding H-1B visa. . The debate over the number of visas to grant to foreign workers seeking employment in the United States should not mask another trend: the growth of IT company skills within developing countries, particularly China and India.
The Digital Divide
For example, the Institute of Computer Technology at the Chinese Academy of Science and Tsinghua University was actively involved in the development of the Open64 optimization compiler [59]. The idea of a digital divide became popular in the mid-1990s with the rapid growth in popularity of the World Wide Web. In 2012, approximately 2.2 billion people, representing approximately 34 percent of the world's population, had access to the Internet.
In 2012, only about 16 percent of the population in Africa – every sixth person – had access to the Internet [63]. For example, less than 25 percent of people in the following countries have mobile phones: North Korea, Eritrea, Cuba, Kiribati, Somalia, South Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Tuvalu, and Djibouti [64]. Pew Internet surveyed Americans to find out how many of them used the Internet in 2008.
Ultimately, the price of the technology becomes so low that it becomes available to almost everyone. In the standardization model, the technology is ultimately embraced by almost everyone in all groups. In the stratification model, the final acceptance rate of the technology is lower for less privileged groups.
The percentage of people in group B who adopt the technology is somewhere between the levels of the other two groups. In 1960, the average gross domestic product (GDP) of the richest countries was 18 times greater than the average GDP of the poorest countries. Some of the poorest countries became even more impoverished during the last third of the twentieth century [28].
For example, before the introduction of the new technology, unemployed workers visited the social welfare office three times a. Warschauer's second criticism of the term "digital divide" is that it implies that everyone is on one side or the other of a grand canyon. A significant amount of money is needed to upgrade the Internet infrastructure to support the higher bandwidth applications of the future.
The “Winner-Take-All Society”
Between 1979 and 1989, the inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 1 percent of American wage earners doubled, while median income remained flat and the average income of the bottom 20 percent actually fell. Winner-take-all effects attract some of the most talented people to socially unproductive work. The multimillion-dollar revenues of a relatively small number of leading lawyers help attract many of the brightest students to law school.
A disproportionate share of the best and brightest college students are concentrated at a few elite institutions. Therefore, high school students interested in reaching the top of the legal profession know that their best chance is to do their undergraduate work at an elite school. Their skill levels are very close (see Table 10.2), but near the end of the 2009 season, Furyk had won 99 times more in prizes than Bateman.
Parity has been restored, but now all workers must bear the burden of the longer hours. Finally, campaign finance reform could reduce the political power of the richest 1 percent of the population, who control more than a third of the wealth. Reducing the political power of the very wealthy is another way to reduce the attractiveness of competing for the highest-paying positions.
However, the length of the working week has not halved in the most industrialized countries. Critics of globalization say it forces workers in highly developed countries to compete with people willing to work for a fraction of the pay. Frank and Cook coined the term "winner-takes-all society" to refer to the way information technology, the spread of English, network effects, and other factors create markets where a few top performers capture a disproportionate share of the rewards.
If automation has doubled productivity since World War II, why hasn't the work week gotten shorter? Why does Warschauer say that the notion of the digital divide is too simplistic and perhaps harmful. In fact, the system is used by Major League Baseball to evaluate the accuracy of umpires' calls.
If so, which of the proposed solutions in section 10.6.2 would make the most sense for the music industry. Each group of recruiters representing one of the three companies should make a "pitch" highlighting the reasons why their company represents the best opportunity.
