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A World Upended…”Get Ready”

February 20, 2014 By Will Richardson

From the “I Really Don’t Mean to Be Debbie Downer Department” comes this analysis from a fascinating and scary newish blog from John Robb:

Technological change is rapidly killing entire industries and job categories without replacing them.   Across the board, incremental productivity improvements are making it possible for employers to get by without hiring new people (even the head of the biggest employer in the World has plans to replace most of his workers with robots).  However, that won’t be where we see the greatest losses.   Those losses will occur in the industries that are completely gutted from the arrival of products and services that make them obsolete.

As this trend strengthens, we may see results similar to what we saw with the agrarian economy.   If that occurs, the extreme endpoint of this decline may be a world where most of the commercial activity in goods and services we see today — from education to health care to manufacturing to transportation to retail to legal services — is accomplished by less than 1% of the people it used to require.  

That means only 1 of the hundred jobs being done currently will be left.  More strikingly, it’s very likely this won’t take the 200 years it took agriculture to go from 95% of the population to less than 1%.  It’s going to be much, much faster this time due to the speed at which improvements can be distributed (software/data).  Given this catalyst, we may find ourselves more than half of the way there within twenty years.

Not quite the world we’re educating our kids for, huh?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: future, future of work

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