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This is incredible…Did You Know?
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Almost everything is on a “lifecycle” for lack of a better word. I would argue that the services described above have all reached a point in their lifecycle where everything of value has been wrung out of it. The lifecycle is not over though, it is simply at its most commoditized point. The fact that a robot has replaced the prior product/service/person simply means that the function had reached a point where it had been so described, processed, regimented, and systematized that a robot could be built to follow all of the rules that describe what needs to be done.
Robots are not bad. They are what happens at the ultimate low value end of a lifecycle. This is happening all over, with everything that can be described by rules and processes. Basically anything that is repetitive can be automated, which is all that robots are. Further examples include: taxes being done by Indians in Mumbai, x-rays being done by those same Indians, cheap nasty manufacturing in China (duh), but also crops being planted by machine with the help of GPS guidance systems, paper being made on presses 125 feet wide going 35 miles an hour. on and on.
The value is gone when a process can be sued to describe something. Value remains where things are one-off, custom, and otherwise cannot be described for purposes of automating a process.
The above are all examples of formerly high value service that reached the low value commodity end of their lifecycle. Prior to being automated, EACH example had a long and high value life.
To me the point that gets missed in this line of thought is that by the time in the lifecycle that automation shows up, the high value has been reassigned to something that is new. The clock is reset and starts over in effect back at the valuable specialty point of the lifecycle. A good example of this is the craze around 3D movies. They cost a premium right? They are new right? I think they are positioned back at the beginning of the lifecycle for movies. The trad 2D movies as we all know are now DVD’ed, streamed, pirated and otherwise treated like commodities.
Innovation is important. Thinkers, creators and those looking to solve problems are no longer involved or needed in the commodity part of the cycle. Instead, they are off solving problems and coming up with the new things and services that live at the specialty front end of yet one more new cycle. And if they are not they should be.
To me, this is the problem with unions and other complacent sectors of our culture. They stay in place, while everything else changes around them, leapfrogs them and soon replaces them.
my .02
JeffJeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI. -
[Jeff Bach] “To me the point that gets missed in this line of thought is that by the time in the lifecycle that automation shows up, the high value has been reassigned to something that is new. The clock is reset and starts over in effect back at the valuable specialty point of the lifecycle. Innovation is important. Thinkers, creators and those looking to solve problems are no longer involved or needed in the commodity part of the cycle. Instead, they are off solving problems and coming up with the new things and services that live at the specialty front end of yet one more new cycle. And if they are not they should be.”
I would agree with this thought 100%, Jeff.
Unfortunately…
It ignores an important reality of the market, one that you can spot quite easily if you look around you: the innovators and thinkers are few, while the worker bees are many.
It is the worker bees that are being put out of work, not the thinkers and innovators.
In the World Just Past (Passed?), the preponderance of workers were those who did the menial tasks and/or repetitious labor.
There is becoming increasingly less and less room for this kind of worker, at the same time that there is becoming a greater and greater population base and an ever increasing demand for primary resources — such as food, water, energy and other “primary” resources.
In an Information Age, the “haves” and the “have nots” will be more measured by gray matter and vision than by money or even muscles. With a lot of cunning and ambition and enthusiasm, money can be found and opportunities exploited. But when muscle is not needed, because the value of labor has been so diminished, there is going to far less opportunity for those who have no vision or real ability to innovate.
Therein lies the rub…
Ron Lindeboom
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Readers take heed – I think Ron has hit the nail on the head as far as articulating the dangers of complacency and failing to keep your nose in the wind as far as discovering new things that lead to new sources of work and revenue.
Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI. -
Thank you, Jeff.
One of the smartest men on the planet is Alan Greenspan (that doesn’t mean that I always agree with his politics or his worldview, because I am not one of the smartest men on the planet and so I reserve a little stupidity for myself), and he calls these times “The Age of Turbulence.” I like that description. It really captures the essence of the times we face.
Another name that is being kicked around is “The New Normal” — when describing the chaotic near-dizzying sense of hyper-competition that we are facing thanks to the internet.
Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat (highly recommended), says that there are two kinds of countries: fast countries, and slow countries. He cites those that try to get involved in the new order of things vs those who try to use protectionism to protect themselves in the face of hyper-connectedness and hyper-competition.
As I read these kind of ideas, I come away from it all with the belief that too many of our kids got fed the Self-Esteem Kool-Aid and they drank every drop. But many of the kids from around the world were fed no such thing. The world doesn’t owe them anything other than what they can take from it. They are motivated. They are hyper-competitive because they want to earn a place on the world stage.
Too many Americans still think they have a God-given place on the world stage. To that, all I can say, is that even the Good Book says that you must “take the book.” It isn’t given to anyone.
The future is going to be a rough place for those who think that life is fair and that they are entitled to their place in it.
Like Alice down the rabbit hole, things keep getting curiouser and curiouser.
If only they’d stop shaking…
Ron Lindeboom
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