Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 165

injury, companies are now using cloud computing to develop and train
robotic systems to replace human labor (Harris 2013a). Even some cloud
companies are shedding jobs. For example, Cisco, which built a business
based on providing hardware, software, and services to on-site data cen-
ters, announced layoffs of 4,000 workers in 2013 because it has not been
able to overcome the declining business of serving on-site IT with cloud
services (Wortham 2013).
This is a signiicant development for the IT workforce. Undoubt-
edly, new jobs will emerge requiring expertise to manage IT utilities, to
mediate relationships between centralized cloud providers and individual
businesses, and to make use of big-data analytics. They are also likely to
grow in certain specialized areas such as security because, as more data
and business functions are moved to the cloud, opportunities for hacking
and surveillance will also increase. The growth of cyber-security laws and
regulations to minimize security problems will also require considerable
expertise to address the complex problems of complying with new legal
and regulatory regimes. Nevertheless, these additional jobs are not likely
to keep up with the mass downsizing of individual IT departments in
corporations and government agencies. Concerns over security might also
slow the process as organizations choose to adopt the private over the
public cloud in order to better control their own data. But this is more
about whether the transition will take place over ive rather than ten years,
not whether it will happen at all. Not only do most observers believe that
it will, but many see the shrinking of the IT workforce as only one piece
of an even larger process of transforming most knowledge labor through
IT and cloud computing.
One way to understand this larger process begins with recognizing
that not all IT work takes place in IT departments. Such work occupies an
increasing share of all knowledge labor, which includes most jobs involved
with the production, processing, and distribution of information (Mosco
and McKercher 2008). This encompasses work in schools, libraries, and
media industries like newspapers, as well as in the audiovisual and social-
media industries. It also includes jobs in health care, law, banking, insur-
ance, transportation, social services, and security. The power of cloud
computing and the increasing reliance on big data, algorithms, and analyt-
ics for decision making make it possible to subsume into technology much
of what the professions in the information and cultural industries labor