Here's a look at three technological factors reshaping the economies and job markets in developed countries:
BIG DATA
At the heart of the biggest technological changes today is what computer scientists call "Big Data." Computers thrive on information, and they're feasting on an unprecedented amount of it — from the Internet, from Twitter messages and other social media sources, from the barcodes and sensors being slapped on everything from boxes of Huggies diapers to stamping machines in car plants.
According to a Harvard Business Review article by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more information now crosses the Internet every second than the entire Internet stored 20 years ago. Every hour, they note, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. collects 50 million filing cabinets' worth of information from its dealings with customers.
No human could make sense of so much data. But computers can. They can sift through mountains of information and deliver valuable insights to decision-makers in businesses and government agencies. For instance, Wal-Mart's analysis of Twitter traffic helped convince it to increase the amount of "Avengers" merchandise it offered when the superhero movie came out last year and to introduce a private-label corn chip in the American Southwest.
Google's automated car can only drive by itself by tapping into Google's vast collection of maps and using information pouring in from special sensors to negotiate traffic.
"What's different to me is the raw amount of data out there because of the Web, because of these devices, because we're attaching sensors to things," says McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business and the co-author of "Race Against the Machine."
"The fuel of science is data," he says. "We have so much more of that rocket fuel."
So far, public attention has focused on the potential threats to privacy as companies use technology to gather clues about their customers' buying habits and lifestyles.
"What is less visible," says software entrepreneur Martin Ford, "is that organizations are collecting huge amounts of data about their internal operations and about what their employees are doing." The computers can use that information to "figure out how to do a great many jobs" that humans do now.
Gary Mintchell, editor in chief of Automation World, recalls starting work in manufacturing years ago as a "grunge, white-collar worker." He'd walk around the factory floor with a clipboard, recording information from machines, then go back to an office and enter the data by hand onto a spreadsheet.
Now that grunge work is conducted by powerful "operations management" software systems developed by businesses such as General Electric Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va. These systems continuously collect, analyze and summarize in digestible form information about all aspects of factory operations —energy consumption, labor costs, quality problems, customer orders.
And the guys wandering the factory floor with clipboards? They're gone.
THE CLOUD
In the old days — say, five years ago — businesses that had to track lots of information needed to install servers in their offices and hire technical staff to run them. "Cloud computing" has changed everything.
Now, companies can store information on the Internet — perhaps through Amazon Web Services or Google App Engine — and grab it when they need it. And they don't need to hire experts to do it.
Cloud computing "is a catch-all term for the ability to rent as much computer power as you need without having to buy it, without having to know a lot about it," McAfee says. "It really has opened up very high-powered computing to the masses."
Small businesses, which have no budget for a big technology department, are especially eager to take advantage of the cheap computer power offered in the cloud.
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