As more and more pieces of business are automated and brought online, does that mean there is less of a need for people to do the work? Could the rise of the internet be what is keeping unemployment steady at 9.2%?

A recent article at forbes makes this proposition:

Over the past twenty years, the technology industry, led by companies like Microsoft, have given us powerful databases, operating systems, networks and software applications that have made it easier for us to accomplish more tasks than we did before with less people. And it’s not just Microsoft who you can blame.

Blame Sage, who makes Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management software that has enabled businesses to automate their marketing campaigns, build workflows for alerting managers when inventory needs to be replenished and generate workorders and invoices that are immediately emailed without employing teams of people.

Blame Rackspace and Amazon and other cloud based infrastructure providers, who allow us to host all of our business applications on their servers, thereby eliminating many in our information technology departments and cutting back on wasted time from downed computers and security flaws.

He’s got a point — businesses are becoming more efficient with less people, thanks to the internet and software systems. For example, when is the last time you visited a bank teller? I know I haven’t seen one for years because I do all my banking online and through ATMs. When I shop, I do it online rather than local retail stores.

Not only have I contributed to this trend when I buy, but I’ve been a key player in building these job-sucking software systems. In fact, when I worked at Arthur Andersen, I remember a project where we wrote a system specifically to replace a group of twenty data entry people. One member of my team was responsible for getting the “requirements” from the data entry group. This consisted of documenting their job so that we could then implement it in code. Ouch.

Of course, the data entry team knew that our system would replace them and they were a understandably a hostile audience for the requirements gathering. One especially contentious meeting left our analyst in tears. Was she right to be sad that the system we were building would cost these people their job?

But isn’t greater efficiency the definition of progress? For example, 58% of the labor force were farmers in 1860. Through more efficient equipment and growing techniques, that number has dropped to 2.6% by 1990. In other words, many farmers have lost their jobs as farming has become more efficient. Would life be better for the country and the world if more of us were still farming?

I would argue that the world progresses by becoming extremely efficient at one field so its labor force can move onto another (more advanced) field. The problems occurs when people cannot be easily retrained for new jobs and occupations. So maybe the issue is not with the internet and automation, but with the education system?

Thankfully, the internet is about to increase unemployment in the education system as well with the rise of the Khan Academy. But don’t worry, it’s more efficient so it has to be better…right?

With Steve Jobs stepping down, it’s a good time to look at what makes Apple special. How have they been able to make hit after hit, and even briefly pass Exxon to achive the largest market value in the US?

To understand what makes Apple special, we need look no further than the words of Steve Jobs at the iPad 2 unveiling:

I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

In other words, Apple’s secret sauce is making technology not only functional but beautiful. They make technology devices that people want to own not just because they work, but because they are works of art. And, because of that, they have achieved their vaunted “coolness” factor that propelled first the iPod, then the iPhone and iPad to success.

The question is will this marriage of technology and liberal arts remain once Jobs is gone? If history is any indicator, things do not look good for Apple in a post-Jobs world. When he left Apple the first time, the new execs stopped taking the big risks that created the original Apple II and the company tanked. When Jobs returned from the wilderness, the company steadily rose again. You can practically track when Jobs was at the company by looking at when they released their most successful products.

So what makes Jobs special? Job’s special skill is that of taste. In fact, he famously said:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste

Jobs role at Apple was not really to design anything (they have Ives for that) or code anything, it was that of the great editor. He decided which products Apple should bet the company on and which features should be added or (more often) cut to make a beautiful product that the market would love. He had that mystical “taste”.

So the question now is: does Tim Cook have taste?

If you’ve ever had to program a calendar or struggled with UTC or time zones (I know I’ve been there), this article will help. It’s geared toward the unix programmer, but it’s useful for anyone.

Here are the highlights :

• UTC: The time at zero degrees longitude (the Prime Meridian) is called Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).
• GMT: UTC used to be called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) because the Prime Meridian was (arbitrarily) chosen to pass through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
• Other timezones can be written as an offset from UTC. Australian Eastern Standard Time is UTC+1000. e.g. 10:00 UTC is 20:00 EST on the same day. Daylight saving does not affect UTC. It’s just a polity deciding to change its timezone (offset from UTC). For example, GMT is still used: it’s the British national timezone in winter. In summer it becomes BST.

Lastly, the author makes this important point:

Timezones are a presentation-layer problem! Most of your code shouldn’t be dealing with timezones or local time, it should be passing Unix time around.