Left, Right, Left, Right

Image: The REAL workforce of the future ... Are you ready?



Left, Right, Left, Right ...

We're talking about the brains of "millennials" here...

While still on the topic of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (see Aug. 8 post):

Another peeve of Dr. Tim Ball (whose own website seems to have gone caput) is "millennials", Ocasio-Cortez, of course, being one of them.  Again, I can't blame him for being peeved, and I do hope his site is not suffering a DoS attack, but he's taken to lumping and labeling people, and I don't feel comfortable with that.

PJMedia: Hot Air and Ignorance About Methane From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
By Dr. Tim Ball and Thomas Harris February 21, 2019

• The GND [Green New Deal] is driven by the emotional ideology that is the religion of environmentalism for too many millennials.​

Too many? How many is that? Is there really such a thing as a "millennial", and, if so, how can they be the problem of the future when they themselves are being overrun by AI - Artificial Intelligence?  Those "millennials" who studied for many of the careers our society has respected in the past are increasingly tough out of luck in the job market.  Is that really their fault?

I think there are generations ahead of them that don't give a hoot what happens to society itself as long as there is money to be made from technology.

Even HuffPost has chimed in against the so-called millennials:

HuffPost: Where Millennials Went Wrong and How They’re Paying the Price

• They contributed $1 trillion to our national student loan debt [Bloomberg]
• They are the most educated generation in human history, yet they have the highest share of people who are unemployed in the last 40 years [USA Today]
• 48% of employed college graduates have jobs that do not require a four-year degree. [The Center for College Affordability and Productivity]
• Nearly 1/3 have postponed marriage or having a baby due to the recession. [Pew Research]

First of all, I'm from "The Greatest Generation" and I'm here to tell you that my generation may be labelled "great", but it has always had a mental block regarding higher education - which in my opinion should always have been FREE for the taking. And that goes for health care as well.

And don't talk to me about dollars in the trillions unless you're going to include the Pentagon's obscene budget courtesy of the American taxpayer!

So many of society's problems could have been avoided by making it easy for all citizens to achieve their greatest potential without having to worry about how to pay for it. Because, believe me, society pays in the end with prisons, police forces, social workers, psychiatric facilities, welfare, desperate criminal acts ... and illiteracy due to cutting corners on education at any level.

Now we don't even talk in terms of knowledge, we talk in terms of "skill sets". Knowledge is the enemy of our Brave New World, where babies are increasingly hatched in petrie dishes and fewer and fewer citizens have knowledge of history, biology, literature, the arts, or even spelling, grammar and basic arithmetic.

People should rather all be AI Specialists or E-Commerce grads (with a few medical types thrown in) so they can eventually live like this:

CIO.com: The workforce of the future is already here; are you ready?

• The point is, human beings adapt. They have and want purpose, so they find new jobs, explore new skills, and find new ways to earn a living. That’s not unlike what will happen in this next wave of innovation.
• ... some in new and increasingly important fields like engineering and artificial intelligence, and others in more traditional roles, specifically those that focus on caring for, or helping, people (like teaching or nursing).
• There’s going to be an increasingly important premium on those “right brain” skills like social and emotional intelligence and new media literacy
• In other words, there will be no use for the "left brain" skills... 

Oh, really? Well, here's the first thing they should learn. It's very likely not even possible for a brain not to use its left side. If so there will be disciplinary problems galore. And another employment opportunity will arise in "Corrections", and I hate to think what that will entail.

LiveScience: What's the Difference Between the Right Brain and Left Brain?

• In a sweeping two-year study, published in 2013 in the journal PLOS One, researchers looked at the brains of more than 1,000 people and found no evidence for significant differences in brain-side dominance among individuals.
• Just about everything about your brain that makes you human exists on both sides of the organ.

How to take the human out of the human, eh?  A project for technology, no doubt. Soon we can all choose whether to be tin men, cowards, and/or heartless. Was The Wizard of Oz yet another omen of modern reality?

VIDEO: Simon Sinek: Job Satisfaction? "There Ain't no App for that!"

Interesting and sympathetic, but soon to be very, very outdated because he doesn't even touch on having to work with AI.
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