Monday 5 December 2016

Dude, where is my job?

I remember when I started working in a bank a couple of years ago, the teamwork at that moment was constituted with approximately a hundred people and each one was in charge of a single duty. After two years, the team was reduced to half and four years later the team was formed only by twenty people and the workplace was occupied with more machines than human workers. But who should we blame for a such an enormous redundancy? The person who refuses to follow the advance of technology or the technology itself? Technology is here to stay and there is no other alternative than accept it and adapt to its power. The same thing that happened in the bank, happened in other areas as well. It is happening now in all areas of society. Human organic machine is been substituted by A.I (artificial intelligence) which is another kind of machine, much more efficient and this machine never get tired or get sick. It just need some maintenance regularly. The Big Corporations, as usual always eager for profits, have Interesting examples of how human beings are not necessary in some jobs any more. I.e: Drones have been tested by Amazon to replace its delivers, according to the Guardian:

Amazon has announced that it will partner with the British government to run tests exploring the viability of delivery of small parcels by drone – the first time such tests have been run in the UK. The company announced that a cross-government team supported by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) gave permission to Amazon to explore three key areas: operations beyond line of sight, obstacle avoidance and flights where one person operates multiple autonomous drones. The experiment will look at drones carrying deliveries weighing 2.3kg (5lb) or less – which make up 90% of Amazon’s sales, a company spokeswoman said.” (1)

With the exploration of high technology in all areas of human life, what could happen to our beloved area, Library and Information Sciences? How the old fashioned librarian should behave in these modern digital times? 
The same kind of redundancy that has happened to the bank that I once worked to, has been happening to my local library as well. The warm and happy faces were substituted by efficient and cold computers. Again, according to The Guardian:

Peter Preston, in dismissing Save Our Libraries Day, asserts that technology has changed our reading habits (Making way for the new, 7 February). He means, of course, that technology has changed his reading habits. His view is typical of many journalists and politicians now commenting on public libraries: comfortably off, with internet access, Kindles, iPads and Amazon accounts, they have no need to use their local libraries, and have little idea how much goes on in them. Yet they advocate, as Preston does, that "some things have to go" and point to libraries.” (2)

Unfortunately, it is sad but true words, specially for the old fashionable reader who really loves the smell and the touch of books and compares the library as some sacred place like the Vatican for Catholicism or some sacred stones for the native Hawaiians. For these kind of readers, closing a library or changing its physical collection to digital collection which is accessible only through a machine instead by their own hands, has the same effect of closing a church or destroying a sacred stone. But at the end, the one who do not want to be included in the massive group of people who are being superfluous every day in the I.T societies, is the one who thinks that adaptation in this kind of society is the cleverest decision to be made to prevent redundancy.  


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