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As our Case is New. . . .

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Late in my career, I switched departments, to computer information systems, largely because PCs were just being produced, and because, following Mari to a graduate program, I had learned something about information systems.  

 The field was still struggling to gain respectability.  Management Information Systems, for instance, was often called "mismanagement" by colleagues in other departments who then, like somebody on Hee Haw, hooted and slapped their jeans.  It seemed to me that the ability of computerized information systems, which could virtually eliminate time (electronic speed of information exchange), and space (it didn't matter how far away the information was stored), and capacity (mini, micro, nano, pico abilities to store massive amounts in tiny spaces), was going to change almost everything.  

 At the time, what was frustrating was that students didn't care much about any of that.  They wanted to learn to code and get paid by Microsoft.  

 For example, at the same time that I was enrolled in the IS program, I translated a book from Norwegian to English, a process that required lots of dictionaries, maps, and face-to-face questioning about idioms, et cetera.  I still have a substantial box stuffed with Norwegian dictionaries.  But now, when I read something that puzzles me in a Norwegian newspaper online, I open a new tab and there it all is, instantly.  Then, if I wanted to read a foreign newspaper, I had to go to the library and pick up the latest week or ten-day old print copy of the paper.  Now I click on Dagbladet, or Der Spiegel for the day's paper.  

 Our political system, and most of our politicians, do not really comprehend the extent to which computers and computerized information systems are changing everything from mining coal, or not needing to mine coal, to how cars and Caterpillars are built, and even how cars are driven.  

 The cute messages littering the internet about people who will not go out and get a job are clueless and ignorant about what happened to those jobs.  Steel mills do not employ thousands of people, anymore.  Computerized machinery can spot weld automobiles together much faster and more precisely than people can.  Children's toys have greater computing power than early astronauts had.  Telephones are astounding in what they can do.  Coal mining is not pick and shovel work.  

 Promising to put coal miners back to work is cruel ignorance.  It won't be in old-fashioned coal mines.  If those coal miners are to find work, it will have to be doing something else.  And what chance do most fifty-year-old coal miners have competing for jobs with college graduates, on the one hand, or young, strong people from neighboring countries who are desperate for work, too?  Are the miners going to pick lettuce all day in Salinas?  

 It isn't just the coal miners or the automobile assembly plants.  It is how retail goods are sold and delivered:  Amazon, anyone?  Does anyone remember what architects used to do?  Now CAM/CAD design and manufacturing is available to everyone.   Farm tractors take instructions about soil prep from computers and global positioning systems.  When I was a fisherman in Alaska, we felt our way across the Gulf of Alaska almost by dead reckoning and luck.  When I built a small boat, a few years ago, it had a Garman positioning system that knew more about the water and rocks around me that Mark Twain did and, later, showed me precisely where I had been, just in case I had not been paying attention to the fog.  

 And it is not just the old industrial age jobs that simply are not there, or that are almost not there, anymore.  The people who send around those scornful messages about people not willing to work are next in line to not be capable of finding a new career.  

 Abraham Lincoln was not talking about the industrial or the information revolutions, but his words apply, as well now.

 "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our country." [Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862]

 Almost half of the voters in our country elected a man to office who legitimized their fear for the future, not because the man understood the situation, because he does not, but because a lot of people knew something was happening to them and their jobs, and the prospects for their kids.  And even the people who were disgusted at him, who did not vote for him, did so because he was disgusting, not because they--the voters--saw what the real issues were.  

 The ground is changing under our feet, and it cannot and will not be stopped.  And, if we are to manage it, as we surely can, however messily, we shall have to think anew and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save ourselves.

 Lay off all that Great Wall crap, and bringing back smelter jobs!  Mexico and Canada and China and Nancy Pelosi are not the problem.  Not thinking anew is.

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