Free Software - Technology and Jobs

Free Software

Free Software Foundation

Free software means software that respects users' freedom and community. It is a matter of liberty, not price.





A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Free software does not mean noncommercial

• A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution.
• Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. 
• You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

Technology and Jobs

"Technology and Jobs: Should we worry?" 

This conference took place last year in Los Angeles. The main topic of it was the people's fear of losing their jobs beucase of the increasing use of technology. 

Four experts spoke about the influence that technology has in the labor sphere. These are some of the interesting ideas they pointed:

• Since the use of machinery in workplaces increased, some new jobs have born. For example, nowadays, we need people with the ability to design electronic gadgets and people who know how to repair them too. A hundred years ago, that kind of jobs did not exist.
• Other kinds of job are in danger of extinction, for example lawyers. For that specific job, what is happening is that people do not need someone to help them with their financial issues because computers can perform that type of tasks.
• On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs that must be performed by people, for example: jobs related to medicine, psychologists, teachers, some jobs related to the business world. 
• If in the future, more jobs start to desappear because of techonology, societies would have to take the decision to accept this situation or to try to change it. 

From my point of view, technology would not be able to replace humans in the majority of labor areas, at least for 50 years. Artificial Intelligence is not that advanced to cause a masive extinction of jobs. However, if we do not want this to happen in the future, we must impulse the human workforce above technology.