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Job churn

Business

Since I was born, humans have created 6 billion jobs.

All while technology relentlessly disrupts existing industries.

The pin making machine replaced the hand-crafted pin.

The ox-pulled plow replaced millions of hours of backbreaking work.

The amplification and electronic distribution of music upended the work of the live musician, and the camera replaced countless portrait artists.

The internet destroyed the travel agent industry, and Grammarly and Photoshop turned fine editing jobs into low-paid gig work.

[Claude adds: Skilled typesetters, trained in working by hand, were angry at desktop publishing, and the digital distribution of music and books ended the future of many traditional retailers. It’s easy to go on… The assembly line replaced skilled craftsmen who built entire products by hand. The printing press eliminated armies of scribes who copied books and documents manually. The calculator made human computers – people hired to perform mathematical calculations – obsolete overnight. The washing machine destroyed the livelihoods of professional laundresses and washerwomen. The automobile industry wiped out blacksmiths, stable hands, and carriage makers. Email and word processors replaced secretaries who specialized in dictation and typing. The mechanized loom put countless hand-weavers out of work during the Industrial Revolution. GPS navigation systems eliminated the need for most mapmakers and drastically reduced demand for physical atlases. Digital photography destroyed the film development industry and put countless photo lab technicians out of work. Self-checkout machines have steadily replaced cashiers across retail stores, and ATMs transformed many bank teller positions.]

When the web arrived, many of the projects I had built as a book packager–some at great cost–became obsolete. It didn’t seem to me that I could do much about this, though. Arguing that I was entitled to have people buy the Information Please Business Almanac instead of looking stuff up online wasn’t going to work.

It’s entirely possible that a magical AI will replace every single human job and then destroy the Earth. But it’s far more likely that the pattern of the last five hundred years will continue.

If this transformation was an opportunity, what would you do with it?

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“GET OUTTA MY WAY”

Business

Pedestrian traffic in Grand Central Station is a bit of a miracle. Thousands of people, all walking quickly, in almost non-Euclidian chaos, headed toward different trains. And no one collides.

We see the same thing at a more dangerous clip when a four lane highway merges. The cars are just a few feet apart (or perhaps a few inches) driving a mile a minute (faster than a cheetah) and yet, collisions are rare.

If one person, just one, running late for a train and carrying a hot pizza, starts shouting and running through the train terminal, the crowd will part and he’s likely to make it to the other side.

It might even work if two different people do it.

It doesn’t scale.

What we’ve learned from thousands of years of practice is that the only way to avoid collisions is to find the confidence and empathy to yield… the shortest way to get to where we’re going involves cooperation and the resiliency that comes with empathy and awareness. When we exchange appropriate spacing and yield when we can, connections occur and we can flow forward.

Selfish brutality might work in the short run, but it always breaks.

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