Deskill

The impact on workers is fairly obvious but I believe that managerial jobs have also been deskilled by the adoption of controlling systems and procedures.

“Word processors are wonderful to make us more productive, but employers tend to take this to an extreme,” she said. “Some secretaries are very pleased with automation, but it's the larger number whose jobs are deskilled, made more redundant.”

But the data she presents “suggest a more complicated reality.” Even where “control or deskilling has been the intent of managerial choices with respect to new information technology, managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and pressures.

[Henrik] Örnebring concluded that there had not been a de-skilling of journalism so much as a more complex process of re-skilling, and this is hard to dispute in relation to the use of technology to undertake a broader range of journalistic duties in the newsroom.

Tragic, too, is the gradual deskilling of teachers, loss of excitement about the profession, and loss of gifted teachers to other pursuits.

In this transition from an economy built on energy-guzzling heavy industry toward a 21st century society of energy-sipping high technology, millions of Americans and Europeans are being “deskilled.”