Bill Gates Warning About the Future: Inventions that will make Excel look primitive
Bill Gates is a creation of American capitalism and could only have become the richest man in the world in America. Unlike people like George Soros or Warren Buffet who are also billionaires, Gates became wealthy because of his creation of a superior product. To this very day I still consider Microsoft Excel to be the most important, and powerful invention of the 20th Century. The Microsoft Office bundle has literally changed the world and revolutionized business. I can send a Microsoft PowerPoint to literally any company in the world, and they can open it and view the information effortlessly through a simple email, and that is a real miracle. 20 years ago for a business meeting I would have had to carry a brief case with me everywhere I went, but now I can download all my documents for a presentation on a “stick” and open them on another company’s computer using Excel to show complicated financial formulas and forecasts that would have taken mountains of paper to do in the past. The cell design of Microsoft Excel is just brilliant. It is a real technical evolution for the human species, and is why Bill Gates is often the world’s richest man. I don’t agree with his views on Common Core education which he shares with another person I admire, George Lucas. I think in that category both men are out of touch to believe that any government is qualified to be in charge of a child’s education. But I would attribute their world view to a naiveté bred from their wealth and a remoteness created from their financial security and success in business. They believe that they can apply the same success they had in their business to government sponsored education which has proven incorrect, but I won’t fault them for those moments of faulty thinking, because they are right in their specific fields much more often. And to that assertion, Gates recently warned world governments of an impending crisis that they must get out ahead of, particularly in The United States. A serious shortage of traditional jobs is coming to every country in the world, and the need to reduce taxes, avoid any increases in the minimum wage, and to find ways to inspire entrepreneurs to create jobs that have not yet been invented is becoming the most important thing anybody can hope to do.
As I mentioned just a few days ago with the future predictions of Ray Kurzweil artificial intelligence will change the world. It is likely that as much as Microsoft Office has changed the way companies have done business, and Excel has had a major impact in the world of finance and management, the technical leaps that will be witnessed in just the next decade will be monumental. Bill Gates is well aware of this upcoming trend because he is one of the shapers of the developing technologies and can see clearly what is happening. Now he is warning the world of the growing crises of “software substitution” that is about to hit virtually every economic market.
Microsoft Excel already does for one individual what a room full of accountants used to perform prior to the computer revolution. All those highly paid jobs have been eliminated and given to people who have not dedicated their life to finance and now perform the same tasks as a mere afterthought—people like me. I’ve always been a creative person, and an in-the-trenches worker, but now it’s not uncommon for me to do complicated spreadsheets in a movie theater before a film begins without much additional effort, because Excel does most of the heavy lifting. This tendency of software substitution will become greater, resulting in millions upon millions of lost jobs over the coming decades. Gates is warning now so that governments can prepare, but most of course will not listen.
Obama’s recent insult of an executive order for salary workers is the most obvious current failure of governments to understand just how behind the curve they are. Obama’s social beliefs were formulated by communists from the 1930s to the 1960s and are why he believes that the profits of the business owner should be shared by the “workers,” which is 100% false. A joke in our family while traveling through remote areas when we hear a song on the radio that is twenty years old is for me to declare that the song just came out in that location. I do this a lot in Louisville, Kentucky where we visit often. My reference is a comment on the backwoods foundations that are built around the city far away from culture centers like Los Angeles, New York and London. Obama’s thoughts are comparable to a song from 1890 just hitting Louisville and them thinking its revolutionary, that’s how far behind the curve, Obama is on what’s happening in the world. But Gates is the one who is writing the songs that aren’t even out yet, and will soon flood the world with their popularity once discovered.
It is only a few years away that drivers for over-the-road trucks will no longer be needed. The trucks will drive themselves. Nurses who monitor patients will be replaced by medical bots, and fast food restaurants will become dramatically automated. Human workers are simply too unreliable, they don’t show up for work enough, and cost too much once there. Insurance companies, financial centers, and most cubical based endeavors will go away. There isn’t enough work to keep workers busy now for 8 hours a day—as Facebook login hours are proving, and as technology increases, this will become much worse. Even manufacturing will change dramatically as 3D printers will increasingly do the task of manual labor for component parts. Gone will be the days where a worker sat in front of a punch press, a sewing machine, or an injection molding unit running production for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. The jobs in the future will be in material acquisition, and inspection, but not in the actual manufacture. Technical assembly will still be a human trait, but every job not requiring human reason which is adaptable by circumstance will be challenged by technology.
It is not that far off that building construction will be done by robots because hiring human workers will be risky and unreliable. It costs too much to hire a human worker with the threat of FMLA benefits, workman’s compensation cases, and the unreliability of momentary lapses in judgment. Software reliability will prove much more attractive to future manufacturing. Governments will strive to suppress technical innovation to protect their taxation structure, but it’s too late for them. A company that wants to make interior car parts for Toyota, Honda, or even Ford will likely move their shop to some African country to avoid the high taxes of developed countries and use 3D printers to make many of their component parts hiring a skeleton crew to perform actual assembly. As McDonald’s workers protest for unionization and a higher minimum wage the same robots working in the medical industry will prepare the food, drop the French Fries and work the drive thru. Humans will load the machines with new food, they’ll do most of the money transactions since intuition will still be required between human customers, and they’ll supervise the sandwich making exercises. But the actual sandwich making will be done by robotic hands. (Do you have any idea dear reader how much money is lost putting too much lettuce on Big Macs can cost McDonald’s per year? Too much! Human error destroys millions of dollars in profit potential.)
Big government people and unionized workers will declare that all this technology is bad for the worker, it’s bad for the human condition, and it is bad for the economy. These same people think that the sun comes up every morning to shine on their faces during their brief visit on earth and are out-of-touch with reality. They are way behind the times that are coming and ill prepared to deal with the realities Bill Gates is warning about. Education will change drastically! Personal pleasure and recreation will change dramatically! Manufacture and product delivery will change dramatically! Service of all kinds will leap into another dimension in just 10 years to something not even recognizable to today’s standards—so the warning as been given—and we’ll see who listens.
The world will not stop evolving just because human beings have not adopted their religions, their politics, and their moral compass to the tools of invention created for the use of advancing society from a perilous past. Every time I open an Excel Spreadsheet I feel privileged to live in such a time that I can use such a thing. What is even better is when I can open a spreadsheet with costs, delivery and material items on my iPad removed from a jacket pocket while waiting for food to arrive while dinning out. Apple Products are not typically compatible with Bill Gate’s Microsoft products but because Microsoft’s Office programs are so heavily used throughout the world, Apple has apps that can interpret them on their platforms. And in just a few years these Excel inventions by Microsoft will seem clunky and barbaric compared to what’s coming. Gates is right; most people are not prepared for those changes. Governments if they were smart would completely reorganize their financial structures to deal with these coming changes and not try to hold the world to outdated and archaic social models where people are chained to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Technology will create nanobots that will allow people to live for centuries instead of decades. Cancer will be cured with a computer program that solves the problem in the human DNA itself—who will retire at 65 or even 85 when they can continue working for 100 or 200 years? Why pay for Medicare when people can just become healthy like they were when they were young? Why pay for a UPS driver when the truck can drive on its own and a delivery bot can drop the package off on a doorstep? Why pay a tractor-trailer driver when it can be driven by GPS and a computer program that will even back the truck up to the dock of a destination? A human driver can only drive so many hours by regulation where an automated driver can continue forever without pause but to refuel. The world is changing–quickly, and Bill Gates is warning everyone as to the specifics of that change. Big government types at this point are way, way…………….way behind and at the rate of technical computation that is now multiplying by the day, they will soon resemble primitive natives throwing spears at airplanes flying 30,000 feet overhead. The choice to be a primitive is one that resists the inevitable and does not heed what Bill Gates is saying—and will be incurred with much peril that is completely avoidable.
Rich Hoffman
