"A whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink

I read this interesting excerpt on How Magazine's website this morning:

You've said that in the emerging economy, the smartest thing someone can do is to be a designer and tell their children to be designers. Why is design a great career move these days?
Because the working world that you and I live in is very different from the one that our parents prepared us for. When I was a kid—and I grew up in a middle-class family, in the middle of America, in the middle of the 1970s—parents told their kids to become doctors, lawyers, accountants or engineers. Those jobs were the pathway to a happy and prosperous life. But that's not true anymore. The economy that's emerging today confers the greatest rewards on a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. It rewards not "left-brain" knowledge workers, but "right-brain" creators and empathizers. The future belongs to those kinds of folks—artists, inventors, caregivers and, yes, designers.

We've heard about this left-brain/right-brain division before. How does it apply here?
The best metaphor to describe what's going on in work and business today is right inside our heads. The structure of our brains reveals a lot about the contours of our times. Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is logical, linear and sequential. It works like a computer. The right side is holistic, artistic and big-picture. Of course, we use both sides of our brain for most things. But the sorts of abilities characteristic of the left hemisphere are becoming less valuable. And the sorts of abilities characteristic of the right hemisphere are becoming more valuable.

Why is this shift happening?
Three big, unstoppable forces. What I call the three A's—abundance, Asia and automation.