The rate of change we are seeing around us is massive. There are threats of automation or artificial intelligence even eating into what is called the white-collar world.
Here’s a suggestion on how you might cope with this overwhelming change: Take on full responsibility for keeping your skills and abilities current.
Article provides a brief summary of our education system. I will expand that with what I have learned elsewhere. Then I’ll mention a plan to dealing with this turmoil.
Sometimes technology can be a bit scary. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Just like technology is constantly being used in ever more exciting ways, technology is also being used in ever more scary ways. A few articles illustrating the downside:
Hotel hacked by ransomware, locking guests in rooms
Police surveillance cameras hacked with ransomware
Software to help plagiarists evade plagiarism detection software
Cloning voice patterns to create voice recordings
Insurance companies using social media for background checks
1/28 – The Local, in Austria – Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked in rooms – A 4-star hotel got hit hard by cyber crooks, who locked the key-based door system. Every door in the place was locked Guests could neither get into a room or leave.
Hotel paid a ransom in bitcoins of 1,500 Euros, or about US$1,608.
This was the third hit at the hotel. They successfully defended against a fourth attack.
Oh, the hotel has a plan to prevent future attacks…
Does the graph remind you of the newspaper and music industry? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Several articles provide an in-depth view of the disruption taking place in several industries due to the IT revolution.
Hollywood is ripe for the same creative destruction we’ve seen in music, newspapers, and publishing.
New York Times is shrinking their physical space and staff size
Prime time TV still having a rough time
The question to ponder in the back of your mind is what are you going to do when this wave of disruption overturns your industry?
January 2017 – Vanity Fair – Why Hollywood As We Know It is Already Over– Looking for a good article on how technology is going to do to Hollywood what IT has already done to music and publishing? If so, this is what you’ve been looking for.
Check out the article to help understand the massive change surrounding us.
Disruption of music industry
First, music and newspapers. The author saw his first indication the music industry would collapse when he started downloading music. Instead of driving to a store somewhere and spending $20 to get one song he wanted, he could spend a buck and get the song immediately.
Author says the music industry has shrunk by half in the last decade. Remember that is after the first round of disruption hit.
Disruption of newspapers
Next were the newspapers. For a long time, the web part of the New York Times was physically separate from the headquarters. “Banished” is the word the author used. At the same time, startups like Instapundit (yeah Professor Reynolds!) and DailyKos were figuring out how to blog. Then WordPress and Tumblr allowed anyone on the planet to start blogging, and doing so for free.
Author says a lot of people didn’t want to wander over to a newsstand and buy a whole newspaper or magazine when instead they could read the single article they wanted, online, for free.
To illustrate the concept, I’ve never bought a copy of Vanity Fair and doubt I ever will. I certainly didn’t drive over to Barnes & Noble to buy the current edition so I could read this article. A blogger I read (see above!) mentioned it and I clicked over.
Difference between this guy and the newspaper industry is this guy has a rope. Oh, and he is doing this intentionally. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Previously explained Still falling of a cliff, newspaper edition. The post has two graphs from Carpe Diem showing the collapse in newsroom employment levels and industry revenue.
Here are a few more articles describing the cliff that newspapers are falling off of.
Ponder the implications for how you look at the world:
When you have developed a perspective or opinion or conclusion on some issue after having thought through all the relevant factors, there is a serious danger that reaching such a conclusion leaves you thinking that anyone with a different perspective is incorrect.
If your carefully drawn, considered opinion is reasonable, then the inference is that other opinions aren’t reasonable.
If you let an economy function, market forces will create pressures to smooth things out. The forces of supply and demand have an amazing ability to balance a temporarily unbalanced marketplace. Several recent articles illustrate this concept in North Dakota.
11/17 – Amy Dalrymple at Dickinson Press – Pipelines now outpacing trucks for gathering Bakken oil– After oil is pulled on the ground it needs to be moved from the well pad to either a rail-loading terminal where it leaves the state by rail or it gets moved to a major transmission pipeline where it leaves the state by pipe.
The oil is initially moved by either trucks or underground pipes.
The number of small gathering pipelines to carry oil away from the wells is finally large enough that more oil is moved by gathering pipelines than by trucks.
(Sarcasm alert!!!! Sometimes ridicule is the only way to deal with foolishness. I dislike sarcasm because it is an unhealthy, corrosive humor. However, there are times when pointing and laughing out loud is the right way to call attention to slanted, agenda-filled bias. Think of all those Hitler-in-the-bunker videos.)
Okay, here we go with the sarcasm…
Ready?
…
I am so silly. Ever since I started paying attention to economics back in high school, I thought we wanted to see a booming economy in order to make life better for people. If we could grow the economy, everyone everywhere would have more money and enjoy a better standard of living. Work-a-day average Joes would have better health, more comfort, and a nicer life. I thought that was our goal.
The disruptive change around us is staggering. Yet I don’t see how it will disrupt my business, which is the auditing sector of public accounting. Before I get into that, here are a few more articles on the change going on around us.
Just in case you are wondering what digital disruption looks like, check out this graph of newspaper ad revenue for the last 65 years, adjusted for inflation:
Adding back digital advertising puts the volume of advertising essentially at the same level as in 1950 when adjusted for inflation. Phrased differently, it took 50 years to go from $20B to $67B and merely 14 years to lose all that growth.
Here’s a few more articles on Bakken I found interesting – adjusting to growth and drop in crude oil prices. How would you handle calls for police service increasing by a factor of 180 over the last 8 years?
1/9 – Oil Patch Dispatch – Record number of births reported in Oil Patch in 2014 – Along with the huge number of workers moving to North Dakota, there is another year of record baby births. Main hospitals in Minot, Williston, and Dickinson report increases of 5%, 7%, and 13% respectively.
Another part of my effort to explain that while I see radical change on the horizon in other areas, I have a blind spot how those things will affect auditing.
Not only have radios become cheap but they’ve collapsed in size while rising in capability. A trailer-pulled radio that weighed one ton in WWI is now a chipset weighing a fraction of an ounce buried inside a smartphone that can handle one million-fold more traffic than those first Marconis.
Combine that with a computer the size of a phone and you have a smart phone.
The two best articles I’ve read that explain the massive shifts we are seeing in the economy were from Walter Russell Mead back in June 2011. Those articles put much in perspective and give a hint at a way forward. They were foundational to me starting to focus on the radical change taking place all around us.
The Death of the American Dream Icompares the painful transition away from family farms to a suburban home funded with a cheap mortgage and paid by working a life-time job. We are now transitioning away from the model that has been in place since everyone reading this was a child. It will be painful, just as the disappearance of the family farm was painful.
Previous posts introduced the simple/complicated/complex/chaotic quadrants of the Cynefin Framework and discussed how that can be used to analyze development issues.
(This discussion is cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update. I’ll put them on this blog as well because the Cynefin Framework is quite helpful for understanding the messy world around us.)
Implications for economics
This framework has huge implications for discussions of economic issues. So many areas come to mind that are actually complex but we treat them as if they are complicated.
Take just one issue – minimum wage.
If this is a complicated issue, then to make life better for people, we can just increase the minimum wage. Go to $8. Maybe $10.
The Telegraph has a full length article on Boomtown, USA. In addition to a great feature in words, there are 9 videos, of about 2 minutes each.
Upside
The upside of the oil boom is incredible. Lots of guys are making $100K to $150K by working hard doing difficult work. The article guesses there are 10,000 men living in crew camps. Each of them is making, by my guess, between $70k and $125K a year.
My guess is most of those guys would be making $40K to $70K if they were working back home. Assuming they even had a job. Most of them wouldn’t.
Business is booming. Consumer stores are crowded. Construction is going as fast as the city can permit projects.
Take just one issue – minimum wage.