Technology and Life in 2020: Good News and Bad News

Forbes continues to have a higher-than-average interest in technology and its impact on work and life, compared to some other major business news media, and in a series of related essays Forbes takes a look at where we will be in 2020, in terms of jobs, health, working and so forth.

One of the points made in one of the essays is that because of Moore's Law, we will by 2020 have 32 times more compute power available to apply to all of those tasks, and that not all the effects will be positive. Those of you who believe manufacturing (I admit I do) remains an important part of any advanced economy will be discouraged by the likely implications. read the essays here

Those of you who are parents might likewise be chastened by some findings of a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report on "Generation M2," which takes a look at the role of media in the lives of youth and children.

The study shows, as I suspect most parents suspect, that reading and good grades tend to go together. About 72 percent of "heavy" readers report getting good grades, while 60 percent of the light readers say so. Read the study

There also is a direct--and inverse--relationship between "time spent with media" and "good grades," as many of you likely also suspect is the case. Children who are heavy media users get lower grades; children who are light media users get higher grades. About 47 percent of "heavy media users" say they get "fair to poor" grades, compared to 23 percent of "light users." And that remains the case when controlling for age, gender, race, parent education, or whether a child is in a one-parent or two-parent household, Kaiser says.

Conversely, 66 percent of "light users" report getting good grades. It isn't clear whether the relationship between grades and heavy media consumption is causal or only a correlation, though. Still, the findings likely correspond to what many parents would conclude.