All these men have is time, paradoxically gifted to them by the advance of the technologies that helped to make them obsolete as workers and as fathers.
Rather than replacing an obsolete service worker, as you might naively expect, reloading the page will keep the out-of-date service worker 'in control' – i.e. intercepting network requests – until you close the tab (and any others with the same page) completely.
"For 200 years of industrial technology, we've been making workers obsolete," McAfee said.
And just as technology and automation rendered those workers obsolete, in the modern age, it's also eradicating all sorts of other jobs; bank tellers, toll booth operators, and pharmacy clerks all may soon be a distant memory.
Many displaced workers have obsolete skills.
Plenty of people before me have lamented the way that we in industrialized countries regard our elderly as unproductive workers or obsolete products, and lock them away in institutions instead of taking them into our own homes out of devotion and duty.
"The people whose skills become obsolete are low-wage workers, and to the extent that it's difficult for them to acquire new skills, it affects inequality".
But technology is bleeding into every aspect of our lives, impacting when and where we work, and rendering traditional office spaces obsolete for so many workers.
While there are surely some jobs rendered obsolete due to automation, workers are still needed, but for higher-level, more tech-related jobs".
And if Poland upgraded its farm technology to western levels, he says, 500,000 more farm workers would become obsolete.
