Douglas Rushkoff recently wondered:
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. … The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Phil Bowermaster imagines the new parameters:
Increasingly, perhaps, a job is something that we each have to create. We can’t count on someone else to create one for us. That model is disappearing. We have to carve something out for ourselves, something that the machines won’t immediately grab.
We discussed earlier Arnold Kling's version of the paradox, "if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced." A.S. at Free Exchange applies the logic of the above arguments to the real world:
The labour market rewards individual capital, being adaptable, knowing your industry, keeping your skills fresh and having a network of peers. The best way to build this is by changing jobs more frequently; a good job now must enhance your personal skill set which you can take somewhere else. That is why even before the crisis, average tenure was declining and most job churn was voluntary. This is a large shift in our definition of what a good job means.
The Dish 