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Where Will You Find Work ?
will work for foodApple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon Are Worth $1 Trillion, but Only Create 150,000 Jobs.
… this appeared all the way back in January - and has been sitting in my drafts folder since! Basically it hits right between the eyes the problem we face as a nation - and planet.
The problem is it isn’t just tech. It is any industry. Wherever you are.
For example see my previous posts about robots like how they might affect the music industry or the service industry
When you think about it we have trained - and to a large extent continue to train - our youth in skills that fit a command and control enterprises with a do as you’re told, work place environment. It worked well for a couple of hundred years, but on the whole those jobs are not coming back - whatever you think, whatever you are told. They will either stay off shore - or when they come back - mechanical, non thinking, repetitive jobs will be increasingly done by robots (I mean that in the broadest sense).
But if that is all you know - how do you take the initiative and learn to make mistakes and understand EVERYTHING you need to understand to be the independent business person. In short it isn’t just reinventing yourself - it is also about survival.
It has to be more than reading Seth Godin’s blog.
The bluntest way this is framed comes at the end of the piece: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook combined account for over $1 trillion dollars of market capitalization. Yet they only employ around 150,000 people total. That’s less than half the number of people who work for GE. And it’s roughly the number of people that enter the U.S. job market every month. In other words, it’s a farce to believe that tech giants, internet startups, and app developers will ever be able to employ the same number of people that manufacturing once did.
I think we are in for a very very difficult period that we are only just now scratching the surface of and understanding.