Countries will use national security and data privacy legislation to prevent job flight. A decent amount of jobs will certainly go, but I suspect the remote future will be more 'remote in-country' rather than 'remote anywhere'
Agreed. The number of IT projects I've seen delivered on time, yet sloppy and with very little re-usability. Immediate cost savings are celebrated, while long term damage and expense is hidden while senior execs quietly move on.
The next step is to bring jobs back because we need a more robust supply chain so that we can accommodate our increasingly chaotic and destructive natural environment.
Massive energy dynamics are at play: the atmosphere is factually hotter and contains much more water (10% more from just the volcano this year!) than it did the day you were born, no hyperbole whatsoever.
We are seeing incredibly destructive weather events more frequently because there is a lot* more energy in the atmosphere.
Every highway & train access around Vancouver, BC, cut off from the rest of the world last year; Pakistan becoming an ocean this month; literally every continent has insane recent forest fire action; landslides everywhere because when the rain comes, it’s epic quantities in record-short time; but at the same time rivers are running dry and energy production has to shut down.
We are in for a rough time, and I think that means we will increasingly need to secure our future through globalized redundancy.
A flash flood wiping out a whiznut manufacturing plant can’t be allowed to wipe out every downstream user of that essential component: cars and tractors and tanks and cellphones all need to be maintained, let alone built new. A whiznut factory is needed on every continent: we can’t put all our eggs in one basket.
When you bring back these factories, you also bring back a lot of valuable jobs at all levels: trades, design, engineering, blue collar, white collar, etc. the whole thing snowballs on itself easily enough.
And, yes, remote workers will be competing in a global market and will go live in a nice affordable bit of the planet. It won’t be Armageddon, you just might not measure up when you have to compete with six billion others, or you might have to go live where you don’t need exorbitant pay.
But back to my point: our over-energized atmosphere is wreaking havoc everywhere, and everything modern is complex enough that radical global production redundancies will be required. This will result in many diverse jobs returning back to the West.
Thank you for reading my thesis, which I have pfma.
Aside: note to whomever has links in WP’s web team: on an iPad (9” pro iirc) with the latest updates, the WP front page briefly shows a headline and photograph, which disappear and I’m thrown straight into what I presume is the start of the body content but could well be a paragraph or two into the story.
