http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/are-workers-too-productive/246454/We all know about Moore's Law; Gordon Moore's 1965 prediction that the number of components making up an integrated circuit would double every two years for at least ten years. Indeed, semiconductor industry output grew at approximately that exponential rate for the next 45 years, and semiconductor manufacturers flooded the market with transistors and memory bits.
There's mounting evidence that Moore's Law applies to commodity work -- labor that can be produced by many different individuals with a minimal amount of training. It's difficult to distinguish the output of one commodity worker from another, just as it is difficult to differentiate wheat grown on one farm from wheat grown on another. If Moore's Law applies to commodity work, commodity workers are in big trouble.
As economies in many advanced nations struggle to create jobs, I worry about whether Moore's Law is spilling over into the job creation process. I worry that computers, smart phones, and robots are making us so productive and enabling us to leverage inexpensive labor so effectively that we are in a steep uphill battle.
To understand why, you have to understand some of the subtler implications of Moore's Law. I have a lot of personal experience with those implications, because I worked at Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, founded by Moore himself, Bob Noyce, and Andy Grove.