The other day I happened to be on a train seated next to a manager from UBER - the mobile-app car ride network. He boasted to me that his company was now the most valuable transportation company on the planet - valued at $47 billion (by comparison, the largest airline - United (UAL) - has a market capitalization of $26 billion). He was proud of the fact that UBER had disrupted the entire taxi cab industry, putting tens of thousands of cab drivers out of work. Instead of cab drivers, UBER relies on freelance contract drivers, who provide their own vehicles. But this army of contractors should not get to be too comfortable in their jobs, for the manager told me that UBER was embracing the advent of driverless - self-driving - cars. By the year 2020, he predicted, these self-driving vehicles would comprise 20% of the market; in the next 30 years drivers would vanish altogether. I'm thinking about the millions of Americans who make a living driving trucks, school buses, delivery vans, taxis, etc. What will happen to them? Where will they find employment?
United Continental Airlines owns or leases billions of dollars worth of aircraft; UBER neither owns nor leases any vehicles. What it does own is an algorithm for soliciting car rides. And UBER is just one example of massive workplace disruption. What happened to the 130,000 employees of Kodak? They lost their jobs to a start-up company with just 13 employees: Instagram.
This disruption is not just an American phenomenon; it is truly global, affecting technologically advanced countries like Germany, as Henrik Müller, a professor at Dortmund University, writes in Der Spiegel:
Eine Studie der Oxforder Forscher Carl Benedikt Frey und Michael Osborne kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass durch die digitale Revolution 47 Prozent der heutigen US-Arbeitsplätze gefährdet sind; in anderen westlichen Ländern dürften die Dimensionen ähnlich sein. Beispiele? Taxifahrer, die Verlegenheitsbeschäftigten unter den Jobsuchenden, werden nicht mehr gebraucht, wenn selbstfahrende Autos erst zum Standard geworden sind. Vollautomatische Frachtschiffe machen Crew und Captain überflüssig. Einfache Smartphones werden per Spracherkennung zum Diktier- und Transkriptionsgerät; Sekretärinnen, die bislang Diktate abgetippt haben, müssen sich andere Aufgaben suchen. Kriege werden mit Drohnen und selbstlenkenden Cruise Missiles geführt. Roboter erobern Haushalte, die Haus- und Putzfrauentätigkeiten ersetzen. Handwerker werden durch 3D-Drucker überflüssig, Fahrradkuriere durch selbststeuernde Logistikdrohnen, Hochschullehrer durch internetbasierte E-Universitäten... Das ist kein Science Fiction. All das gibt es schon. Es wird nur noch nicht massenhaft genutzt. Aber das kann sich rasch ändern.
(A study by the Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne concluded that the Digital Revolution threatens 47% of the jobs in the United States today; the situation is no different in other western countries. Examples? Taxi drivers will no longer be needed when self-driving cars become the standard. Fully automatic container ships will no longer require a captain or crew. Smartphones will use voice recognition technology for dictation and transcription; secretaries will need to find other work. Wars will be fought with drones and self-guided missiles. Robots will take over your homes, replacing maintenance and cleaning help. 3-D printing technology will make mechanics redundant, bicycle couriers by delivery drones, college professors by online universities... this is not science fiction. All this already exists. It just has not yet been fully implemented. But that could quickly change.)
What is the solution? Find a job or career that cannot be easily digitized. Trouble is, somewhere some start-up is already working on an algorithm to make that job or career redundant.
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