Wireless may also have an impact on the way jobs are distributed in the future. Much like we transferred a lot of our manufacturing to Taiwan and Southeast Asia in the 1970s and ’80s, I envision wireless technology enabling a huge transfer of office work [which comprises 70 percent of what we do in our economy] outside of the United States and England, the English-speaking countries or the rich countries of the world, to the ones who are very hungry. It’s an interesting situation in that labor from a hungry nation can be proffered across national boundaries to a rich nation. It’s going to be a massive redistribution of work--everything from customer service and transcribing to mortgage application checking and insurance adjusting.


But if all this routine office work goes overseas a lot of Americans will lose their jobs. Is that a good thing?
Some U.S. office jobs will be lost to foreign office workers just like some manufacturing jobs were lost to East Asia. That’s an inevitable consequence of the lower costs abroad. Short term, the impact will be positive for poor foreign nations who will see their GDP grow as spectacularly as did Taiwan’s in the past two decades. The loss of U.S. jobs will have a short-term negative impact both economically and psychologically for those who are displaced here. But as in the industrial era, U.S. workers will move further up the chain, offering sophisticated services, as opposed to the more routine and clerical ones that will be shipped abroad. Long term, I believe both the developing and the developed nations will benefit from the upward economic surge that results from the increased benefits associated with wireless technology.