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Our physical technologies won’t slow down—Moore’s law will win—so we’re in a race for our social technologies to keep up.
storage, and energy itself is undergoing profound changes affecting all of society. Collectively, the rates of technological change in just these five areas—bio, robo, info, nano, and energy (BRINE, for short)—pose legal, ethical, policy, operational, and strategic opportunities, and risks, that no company or individual can address alone.
while our social technologies—the learning, governing, and regulating systems we need to go along with these accelerations to get the best out of them while cushioning the worst—stall.
So many people today seem to be looking for someone to put on the brakes, or take a hammer to the forces of change—or just give them a simple answer to make their anxiety go away.
Because the pace of change was slower, whatever you had learned in high school or college stayed relevant and useful much longer; skills gaps were less prevalent.
“a high-wage middle-skilled job,”
But there is no longer a high-wage, middle-skilled job.
American dream is now more of a journey than a fixed destination—and one that increasingly feels like walking up a down escalator. You can do it. We all did it as kids—but you do have to walk faster than the escalator, meaning that you need to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning,
You can’t just show up. You need a plan to succeed.
Like everything else in the age of accelerations, securing and holding a job requires dynamic stability—you need to keep pedaling (or paddling) all the time.
“you have to know more, you have to update what you know more often, and you have to do more creative things with it” than just routine tasks. “That recursive loop really defines work and learning today. And that is why self-motivation is now so much more important”—because so much of the learning will now have to happen long after you ha...
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“the motivational divide.” The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.
‘How does it feel to know that there are at least one million people around the world who can do your job?’
We are all feeling mounting performance pressure at a very personal level.”
The massive redistribution of wealth that would be required to support such a society is not politically sustainable.
in the age of accelerations we need to rethink three key social contracts—those between workers and employers, students and educational institutions, and citizens and governments.
The central challenge we need to be focusing on, Bessen argues, is the issue of skills—not the issue of jobs per se.
To be sure, we have jobs that have completely disappeared because the industry completely disappeared. There is probably no one in America, or anywhere for that matter, who makes their living today producing buggy whips—not since the horse and buggy gave way to the automobile.
Why? “Because when you automate a job that has largely been done manually, you make it hugely more productive.” And when that happens, he explained, “prices go down and demand goes up” for the product.
And by the end of that century, most people had multiple sets of clothing, drapes on their windows, rugs on their floors, and upholstery on their furniture. That is, as the automation in weaving went up and the price went down,
“Employment grows significantly faster in occupations that use computers more.”
Why didn’t employment fall? Because the ATM allowed banks to operate branch offices at lower cost. This prompted them to open many more branches, offsetting the erstwhile loss in teller jobs. At the same time, teller skills changed.
But technology can also transfer tasks from one occupation to another. “There are still receptionists who answer phones and take messages,” noted Bessen, “but do other things as well.
At the same time, he pointed out, technology can create demand for totally new jobs—think data science engineers—even
“Technology doesn’t make all workers’ skills more valuable; some skills become valuable, but others go obsolete,”
“Jobs are not going away, but the needed skills for good jobs are going up.” And with this new technology platform we’re now on, it’s all happening faster. For instance, new software—such as AngularJS and Node.js, both Java-based programming languages to build Web-based mobile apps—can come out of nowhere and become the industry standard overnight, far faster than any university can adjust its curriculum.
To compete for such jobs you need more of the three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic—and more of the four Cs—creativity, collaboration, communication, and coding.
So, at a minimum, our educational systems must be retooled to maximize these needed skills and attributes: strong fundamentals in writing, reading, coding, and math; creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; grit, self-motivation, and lifelong learning habits; and entrepreneurship and improvisation—at every level.
Nest Labs’ founder, Tony Fadell—to turn “AI into IA.” In my rendering, that would be to turn artificial intelligence into intelligent assistance, intelligent assistants, and intelligent algorithms.
To help deliver on the latter, AT&T partnered with many universities—from Georgia Tech to Notre Dame to Oklahoma to Stanford to online universities such as Udacity and Coursera—to provide affordable graduate and undergraduate degrees or just specialized training for each one of the skills it needs.
TensorFlow is a set of algorithms that enable fast computers to do “deep learning” with big data sets to perform tasks better than a human brain.
“I would tell them that they should first of all develop their technical skills, but that is not enough. They also need to know how to market themselves. Marketing is not just for marketers—[it’s] a huge part of getting work. I would say work on yourself.”
“Instead, faculty members are employed with renewable-term contracts with a range of term lengths.”
“The whole system is built for employers to fend off all the people flooding their career systems. And so people just throw themselves out there, applying to a hundred places at once; then they get rejected and don’t know why … I saw employers inundated with candidates who were not qualified for basic jobs, and employees who didn’t really know what they were applying for.”
“Now all students can own their performance, because they have access to the best tools of practice.”
The platform also identifies kids who could be successful in AP courses their junior or senior years in high school but may have been too intimidated to sign up or didn’t think they were good enough.
There are three basic ingredients of the Khan–College Board revolution: (1) More will be on you, and you’d better take ownership of that fact and seek out intelligent assistants and assistance everywhere that you can; (2) precisely because more is on you, government and social organizations need to get serious about providing you not just any tools, but much better tools—informed by artificial intelligence tailored exactly for you and your needs and reinforced by a caring adult or coach, wherever possible; and (3) technology can take you only so far. Concentration also matters.
“technology of interruption has outpaced the technology of concentration.”
“There is no ceiling anymore.”
Our current long-term vision at LinkedIn is to extend this professional graph into an economic graph by digitally manifesting every economic opportunity [i.e., job] in the world (full-time and temporary);
“We have to move to more hiring based on mastery, not history,” argued Chopra. “We can steepen the slope of the learning curve, but if that learning and those skills are not recognized in the labor market, there is no incentive and no payoff.”
Thanks to the supernova, the workplace is being globalized, digitized, and roboticized at a speed, scope, and scale we’ve never seen before.
We are going to have to discover the inherent dignity of work that is people to people rather than people to things. We are going to have to realize that engaging with other people, understanding their hopes and their needs, and using our own skills, knowledge and talent to give them what they want at a price they can afford is honest work.
“if it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid. It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”
I am convinced there’s a high probability that a better and fairer workplace is waiting on the other side, if we can learn to combine the best of what is new—artificial intelligence—with the best of what never changes and never will change: self-motivation, caring adults and mentors, and practice in your area of interest or aspiration.
Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school
The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or having had “an internship where they applied what they were learning.” Those workers, he found, “were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.” There’s a message in that bottle.
The Cold War was a struggle between two competing systems of order, dominated by two competing superpowers, who could, relatively speaking, keep their allies ideologically in line, physically intact, and militarily in check.
The relevant geographic and ideological dividing lines were East–West, communist–capitalist, totalitarian–democratic.
As the Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum argued in his book Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era, during this window of overwhelming American dominance, “the main focus of American foreign policy shifted from war to governance, from what other governments did beyond their borders to what they did and how they were organized within them.”
