Over the last week I have been keeping my around the place and perhaps I don't spend time in the right circles, but there appears to be a little more positivity on chain, or a little less negativity, I am not sure which. I think it is kind of what the downvoting has done to the platform where once there is a reduction in the numbers of abusers, those who don't abuse have a chance to rise. Whatever it is though, the place seems more vibrant than it did 2 weeks ago.
As I was driving to work this morning I was thinking about all of the people who head off to university in the hope that the degree they get will help them to land a good enough job to pay off their student loans and then build a nest egg. I was wondering, how many are going to be disappointed?
While I do think there is still a bit of a time cushion left, as the automation and AI tech starts to take jobs, I wonder if they realize that the jobs that many of them are aiming to do are systematic and therefore, technology replaceable. AI doesn't have to be perfect to take our jobs, it just has to be better than us, and with so much variation in us as individuals, that isn't a very difficult feat to accomplish.
What is likely going to be a common outcome in life is that no matter the education, for many, traditional employment is not going to be a viable option as most of the jobs are replaced. For example, for the last few days I have been creating end user training videos for a very large company so that they can use some software. While it might be some time off that an AI could do what I do, it really isn't far off that there will be an AI that can do what the end user does, and therefore by default, we are all obsolete in that supply chain.
So then what do we do?
As I see it, when people are essentially forced out of employment, we are much freer to actually work. Most of the jobs on this earth are go against our human nature as they are soul-sucking and pointless and while they give us an income, in a perfect world, no one would have to do them and if they did - it would be a form of punishment.
For the crimes committed, you are sentenced to 17 years of sitting in a cubicle and manually doing a job that an AI can do 10,000x as fast.
If we don't have to work at the unnecessary tasks, what becomes the necessary? And this is an interesting question that we have all perhaps thought about in the context of winning the lottery and that is;
What do we do if we don't have to work?
While we might fantasize about retiring to a beach, that might only be because we also know what it is to work at a mundane and useless job, something that perhaps the near coming generations may never experience. They may instead have the full freedom to chose what they do without needing to consider earnings at all - but we are nowhere near that point.
So, what about us?
Perhaps the answer is similar to where we are headed toward on Steem where creatives are empowered directly by consumers and consumers are part of the creative process themselves through what they demand and what they earn upon. As I have said, the goal on Steem is where the highest maximization possible on the platform is through creation and curation and if an equilibrium can be found, the developers and investors will enable and partake in the process also.
Equilibrium doesn't mean static, it means that there is a balance in supply and demand even though what is supplied and demanded can change over time. Once upon a time there was a lot of demand for blacksmiths and tinkers, now there is demand for coders and designers. It isn't that no one can earn smithing, it is just that the marketplace can only support a small number before supply saturation.
But market saturation in some areas might never end because while a product could flood a market, the evolution of the product can keep it alive. But, when the majority of the production of those consumer products and services are highly automated, new iterations do not benefit many people as very few salaries will need to be paid.
However, when it comes to human talent and skills, there is no end to the improvement, no end to the supply and, no end to the changing preferences. This means that the market place of jobs of the future for humans is going to be in the creative fields, arts, entertainment, sport and whatever else grabs the attention. I predict that while there will be a great deal of generic mass content, the highest earners will always be the niche players, the ones who offer unique experiences for their clientele.
The coming Community applications and Smart Media Token applications are going to play a role in developing an entirely new way for people to work for earning at a mass scale where people both are owners and earners across applications and tokens. I might create on one for my earnings, but spend on an other for my entertainment, which provides for another creative to earn and then they consume their preferences to pay another. In time, there is a massive goods, service and skills trading economy and the entire thing is traceable and trustless.
At the moment in this world we consume out of convenience and that means that the conglomerates with their crushed supply chains have the upper-hand. But as we lose our jobs to AI and automation, we may all become a bit more orhanic and manual where we create more and consume at a more refined level. Which means that there is more space for artisans again, and those artisans can come in all shapes and sizes.
Most of life for many people is performed to subsist yet when that time spent on survival in the modern world no longer needs to be spent in the useless, we are likely to look at our lives differently. Instead of convenience and algorithm based living, we start to manually curate our experience and to design our activities and lives to better reflect our preferences, as if we had won the lottery.
When we curate our lives with intention, we consume differently and I believe that many will discover that interaction with others will bring more life satisfaction than the withdrawal from social activity that has happened through technology. This doesn't mean that technology doesn't play a role in this of course and I am quite confident that within the next decade, Blockchain tech through cryptocurrencies are going to spill heavily into the realms of our daily lives in a multitude of ways.
While this might seem some time off, what speeds or slows down the uptake of technology and social cultural change is whether the demand is there to drive hard enough to incentivize development. This is an opt-in or opt-out process and the more that opt-in and participate, the faster the momentum builds to reach the tipping point where it becomes unstoppable.
This is something that I feel a lot of people do not understand about Steem. While nothing is too big to fail, the only thing that holds this community back from global domination through a combination of technology, currency and community is the number of people opting-in to add their weight until the critical mass point is found. I believe that when that point is reached, no matter who you are, you are going to wish that you owned a bit of Steem to:
earn with, play with, reward with, live with.
Each day I explore Steem and I am yet to ever have a day where I consider opting-out. I am part of the growing mass and when it reaches the critical point, it is going to have such a gravitational pull on the external community that even those who are the most positive about the future are going to be blown away.
And then the importance of ownership of life will be abundantly clear.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
