Interesting essay from Michael Lund over on the Salon blog that is very relevant for anyone in the “knowledge economy”. Is Ireland ready for the next wave of employment and innovation?

Dilbert, the popular comic strip written and drawn by Scott Adams, is a satirical take on life in a modern office environment. Dilbert the main character is an engineer in a corporate culture that is bureaucratic, where office politics take precedence over productivity and where employees skills are not as important as the insane directives that govern their work lives.

It is also very funny and very true.
Everyone should probably own a copy of The Dilbert Principle

Cube farm workers (like Dilbert) are, the essay argues, a result of the industrial revolution. Technology allows one person to do the work of dozens moving labour from the fields to the factories, from the factories to the cubes.

Computerization is now replacing a lot of office workers with automated systems. Whole businesses get replaced by self service websites.
Dilberts are going to be an endangered species

So where will labour move to now?

The most numerous and stable jobs of tomorrow will be those that cannot be offshored, because they must be performed on U.S. soil, and also cannot be automated, either because they require a high degree of creativity or because they rely on the human touch in face-to-face interactions. The latter are sometimes called “proximity services” and they include the fastest-growing occupations, healthcare and education.


Interestingly, Scott Adams used Google Alerts to find a treatment for a speech defect he suffered from. Google notified him of an “obscure medical publication” that wrote about Spasmodic Dysphonia. He took the information to his own doctor, was referred from there to other doctors, and eventually had successful surgery to fix the voice defect.

I never would have found that path without Google Alerts


So what does this mean for Ireland?

Healthcare is already a huge employer but the opportunity is not in the “front end” services. It is in using creativity and innovation to solve major problems in this area and pull through the other industries. It may be in Life Sciences and Bio Sciences that the future lies.

There are already some fantastic Irish examples. The Artistent work from Trinity College Dublin in the area of flexible stents. The biomedical diagnostics pioneered in Dublin City University. The Light-activated anti bacterial powders from the Dublin Institute of Technology is likely to be a huge success in these days of medical resistant disease.

This is where employment will be after the cube farm. There are some really promising developments. Lets keep them going.

Daily Dilbert

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