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To an alien in a spaceship orbiting Earth, this would seem very strange. Strange, because the alien is assessing the situation with a Whole Earth mindset.
This is obviously not a new phenomenon. Enterprising kids will no longer have real-world and local constraints. The prevalence of cigarettes for past generations seems crazy now that we understand their danger. And how hard it is to set your feelings aside and focus on what your future boss really wants to know? A boss is looking for outcomes, not duties and responsibilities.
Automated wealth creation is good, right? It means more opportunity for individuals to pursue art, hobbies, or create different kinds of wealth in ways that we cannot yet automate. Obviously however, there are short term and local negative consequences. A proposal for 21 hour work weeks recently made its way around the internet.
This is a newer trend, but one whose scope is also increasing. We all know that any kid with a computer and a garage can learn how to code and create the next great thing on the internet, but what about the real world?
Software eating the world does not only provide opportunity to those who code. In San Francisco, anyone with a car and some free time can throw a giant pink mustache on their grille and drive strangers around the city for fun and profit. You can become a personal shopper with Instacart or a virtual assistant with Fancyhands. You can rent out your couch on Airbnb or a parked car at the airport on Flightcar.
People with specific skills can find work on 99 Designs , oDesk , and Mechanical Turk. Each of these scenarios creates wealth.
Many of these services are not widespread outside of the Bay Area, but could be leading indicators as to where labour markets are headed. These systems have re-shaped the standard system of employment and wealth creation.
Overall, lowering the barrier to entry to creating wealth is a valuable trend. We also may be doing a really bad job right now at measuring the impact of this trend with traditional performance indicators like GDP and employment rate. We need to listen to these two trends and make them work for us both collectively and as individuals.
The prevalence of cigarettes for past generations seems crazy now that we understand their danger. Similarly, future generations will look back at us with surprise and horror to learn that we manually drove ourselves around in a glass bubble at breakneck speeds every day and thought nothing of it.
We do this already in some situations, like the robots who eat land mines for breakfast , but we should probably widen the scope of what we consider dangerous. The skills marketplace will become more efficient, making it easier to connect people with specific expertise to real opportunity for wealth creation. Why wait for for some arbitrary point in your education like obtaining a bachelors degree before entering the workplace as a skilled worker? An ambitious first-year graphic design student in Brazil is easily qualified to make a logo for a mom-and-pop shop in Portugal and we should encourage this type of work.
When everyone has the internet in their pocket, the ease of providing a valuable service and getting compensated for that service trends to zero. Enterprising kids will no longer have real-world and local constraints. But it's right on point, and worth saying to yourself a few times until you remember it. Because as Cenedella put it in an article recently:.
A boss is looking for output, not input. A boss is looking for outcomes, not duties and responsibilities. A boss wants to know the end of the story, the bottom line, the score at the end of the game, not the feelings you had while delivering them. And how hard it is to set your feelings aside and focus on what your future boss really wants to know? Your future boss doesn't really care about your objectives, except to the extent that they tell him or her whether you'll kick butt in the role they're looking to fill.
If it's any consolation, it's similar to the mistake that so many salespeople make, and that entrepreneurs looking for investment make: So the balancing act of mastering your own emotional response to past achievements, so that you can take an objective look at the professional value of each of those achievements and its worth to future employers, is the sole "trick" to resume writing.
There is some good news.