Ray Kurzweil is a noted futurist who has written recently about how our increasingly rapid rate of progress and change will affect trade unions in the coming years. The web will lead to an increased decentralization of unions and these unions will be driven by technological change (not opposed to it, as some unions have been in the past). Kurzweil predicts that traditional trade labor unions will be gone soon and will be replaced by web-based affiliations that will help them strive through a virtual hurricane of coming change.

We don’t know about you but we love this kind of stuff because these guys are always a little bit right and a whole lot wrong. There are examples of this everywhere, of course, but check out this futurist’s prognostications from a century ago: http://blogoscoped.com/files/what-may-happen-in-2000-large.jpg

Like we said, part right and lots wrong. So which part is right and which is wrong in Kurzweil’s? No way to find out about the future but to go there.