The new means will create many new opportunities for jobs, both as concerns the so-called "Telework", that is, work performed from home rather than in an office, and as concerns the jobs associated with the production of new networks and above all of new data, in addition to the maintenance of all these systems.
Many employees already have the possibility of working at home instead of going to the office every day. For instance, many research workers can make use of Telework as a further opportunity. Also bank employees could perform their activities at home by connecting to the bank terminal. Stock exchange operators have long been working with the new tools, and the telematic stock exchange is not fully tested. To write their articles news reporters could work whrre it is more convenient to them rather than go to the office. Draughtsmen already use a computer to perform their work, which could be considerably facilitated by telematics.
Classical tellers, civil service employees, bank employees, .the staffs ofithe health service, automobile registry bureau, ministries, as well as bureaucrats of every kind and area will see their job radically changed owing to the possibility, for the private citizen, to put in his applications for certificates and bookings of any nature from home.
Service agencies will evolve in a different manner: from travel agencies to real estate agencies, from financial services to marriage agencies. They will all have to update their services, from their office to the residence of each potential customer.
Also telemedicine will allow remote diagnoses to be made since doctors can be consulted in teleconference; in addition, urgent clinical cases.can be forward to the appropriate hospitals with well-documented booking centers.
Many other applications can be envisioned, but instead of dwelling on them let us analyze the jobs that are strictly associated with the production and fabrication of the telecomputer. Of course both the research and the fabrication proper of telecomputers shall have to be extended, with personnel working in the design and fabrication of the various components besides the assembling of the machines. And then there will be an increasing number of persons involved in the production of transmission and information devices, therefore telecommunication operators, whether by telephone cable or optical-fiber cable; in addition to the construction of all the signal-clearing stations, there will be the physical laying of optical fibers between one city and another, but even more from the exchange to each single house (it will be like bringing the lighting of "information" to each private home).
At the.same time other services will be developed via satellite, with orbiting stations and receiver-transmitter centers, then parabolic plants, installation of receivertransmitters, and signal-transmitting centers. For this reason the stock exchange quotations of telephone and telecommunication stocks have been increasing costantly in recent years.
Then there will be many new:ljobs in the studios for the production of telecomputer programmes, with artists of every sort;, who will operate next to scholars and scientists in all the disciplines. There will also be a need for programmers anf technicians of the information system conversant with the work methods of the news means. For instance, for Internet there is now a need for the knowledge of the HTML language, a hypertextual language that allows the writing of information connected to images.
Another important fact is the continuous updating of information, which will require a considerable commitment of means, materials and manpower. At present new jobs have been created to convert the information on old supports, such as photographs, films, video tapes and paper documents, into the new universals language, with the production of devices such as the scanner, to transmit writings and photographs into a binary format.
Also film and tape collection libraries will have to be updated by conversion into the binary system so as not to lose the enormous patrimony already produced of all the films, TV reports, documentaries and filmed material of every sort.
We are witnessing the creation of a system of alliances between major film companies and TV companies with information and telecommunication companies just with an eye on the event of the century, to wit, "the birth of the Telecomputer".