The World in 2030

The World in 2030 257
In the rich countries we have made a collective decision
to have a limited amount of spare time on our
hands, getting more money to spend during this time
in return. Had we chosen to benefit from our advances
in technology by increasing spare time instead of
increasing affluence we might have worked 20-hour
weeks today. We have elected not to go for this option
– we would have had too little money to spend
in all this spare time and, besides, work has become
more interesting, enough to rival our spare time. 477
In 2030 we’ll be working just as hard as today, although
the ways in which we work will have changed, and we’ll be
playing hard, just as so many successful people do today
(although our leisure pursuits will also have changed).
Let’s take work first. The developed world is outsourcing
its manufacturing and some of its services to the developing
world – e.g. China, India and Thailand. This trend will
continue until the populations of those countries become
so wealthy that local wage costs no longer offer competitive
advantage for global corporations to base manufacturing or
service operations there. After that – probably by around 2030
– we will outsource such work to robots and software agents.
In ‘The Hydrogen Economy’ Jeremy Rifkin writes:
Within a matter of a few decades, the cheapest workers
in the world will not be as cheap as the intelligent
technologies that will replace them, from the factory
floor to the front office. By the middle decades of
the 21 st century, we will likely be able to produce