ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ways in which the subjects of communications, computing and microelectronics are developing and producing an expanding global resource. This is already having an effect on many human activities comparable with the eighteenth-century industrial revolution. The new technologies involved with it offer enormous savings in cost and improvements in performance over conventional methods. The versatility and power of the devices associated with information technology are enabling some representation of human intelligence to be incorporated in them with increasing rapidity, thus permitting the control of events in a quasi-human way. The data handling capacity of future computing and communication systems is becoming both massive and flexible. Such advances are bound to have a profound effect on our social and economic environment; these are examined in order to try to predict the nature of work at the beginning of the 21st century, and the ways in which human society might adapt to it. This leads to an identification of the ways in which the vocational education and training services should respond to meet individual and community needs.
