"The magnitude of the change ... suggests the idea that people may have multiple careers, that they'll be retrained maybe four or five times during their professional careers. That they will increasingly have to learn new skills throughout their professional career. And that the impact on the quality of life or what have you can be very adverse. While in the past there was a sense of some reasonable security, some sense of predictability, this will be much less the case. Particularly, middle managers and middle management will become an endangered species. There is the phrase that I think was invented by a Harvard professor called disintermediation, which is the elimination of the middleman. And that information systems, computers, software and just new styles of management will just largely eliminate that tier of bureaucracy which was, in many ways, the basis of middle-class America.
All of these things are potentially very upsetting. So it's not true that the information highway will just be a cornucopia of good things. At the same time, these may be very necessary transitions. . . . Cutting the cost of education and training, cutting the cost of health services and providing a better product in terms of those services probably is very important to the economic prosperity of the U.S. in the 21st century. We have to change."
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