Wtf?

History tells us technology kills professions, but does not kill jobs. We will find things to work on that we couldn’t do before but now can accomplish with the help of today’s amazing technologies.

Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Study history and notice its patterns. This is the first lesson I learned in how to think about the future.

This is my next lesson. If the future is here, but just not evenly distributed yet, find seeds of that future, study them, and ask yourself how things will be different when they are the new normal. What happens if this trend keeps going?

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

In one of the early classics of systems engineering, Systemantics, John Gall wrote, “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

In a presentation I heard General McChrystal give at the New York Times New Work Summit in the summer of 2016, he said, “I tell people, ‘Don’t follow my orders. Follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.’”11 That is, understand our shared objective, and use your best judgment about how to achieve it.

This outcome-focused, outside-in approach means that, effectively, a team is promising a result, not how they will achieve it.

the point of Uber ultimately isn’t the experience of the app you use on your phone, but the entire service that gets you seamlessly from point A to point B,

Every Silicon Valley firm builds two intertwined systems: the application that serves users, and a hidden set of applications that they use to understand what is happening so that they can continuously improve their service.

“simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data,”

Alas, as Nick Hanauer said to me, soul-searching by CEOs is as likely to affect the economy as “thoughts and prayers for the victims” are to put an end to gun violence.

Future economic historians may look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings.

Having to find people who will pay you for what you create clears out an awful lot of wishful thinking.

Investors focus on companies that will have huge “exits”—that will return at least 10x their investment. This quest for outsize winners has the perverse effect of starving ordinary businesses of capital. A company that may deliver real value but grows slowly and may never achieve global scale is simply uninteresting to investors.

I’ve also watched companies struggle to please investors rather than their customers. A perfectly good business, one that might eventually deliver tens of millions of dollars of revenue and meaningful profits if run properly, is told instead to shoot for the moon, because as a company operating in the real market of goods and services it won’t command the stratospheric exit that it might be able to fetch if properly positioned in the marketplace of expectations.

The chorus of doubt about the jobless future sounds remarkably similar to the one that warned of the death of the software industry due to open source software. Clayton Christensen’s Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits holds true here too. When one thing becomes commoditized, something else becomes valuable. We must ask ourselves what will become valuable as today’s tasks become commoditized.

It is slowly being recognized that the cost of insufficient care for children gets paid one way or another, if not up front, then in healthcare or prison costs later in life.

To those who worry that these small signs of a new economy could not possibly replace the jobs of today, I would once again cite Gibson’s observation that “the future is here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” Every flourishing harvest begins with the smallest of shoots poking their heads through the soil.

The lessons of technology innovation remind us that progress always entails thinking the unthinkable, and then doing things that were previously impossible.

“All of the great advances in our society have come when we have made investments in other people’s children.”

agricultural production doubled over the hundred years from 1820 to 1920, but it took only thirty years for the next doubling, fifteen for the doubling after that, and ten for the doubling after that.

Abraham Lincoln, no economist, but an acute judge of the forces of human history, wrote: Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better, now than they did five thousand years ago …. Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. These improvements he effects by Discoveries and Inventions.5

Knowledge sharing goes from the spoken to the written word, to mass production, to electronic dissemination, to embedding knowledge into tools, services, and devices.

Users without structural literacy about how computers work struggle to use them. They learn by rote. Going from an iPhone to Android, or the reverse, or from PC to Mac, or even from one version of software to another, is difficult for them. They aren’t stupid. These same people have no trouble getting into a strange car and orienting themselves. “Where is that darned lever to open the gas cap?” they ask. They know it’s got to be there somewhere. Someone with structural literacy knows what to look for. They have a functional map of how things ought to work. Those lacking that map are helpless.

It is not just knowledge that we have to teach, it is the ability to learn. To learn constantly. Over the course of my career, learning itself has been the most important part of my ongoing work.

The struggle to find work, which affects far too many people in our economy, has many causes, but if there is one solution that anyone can take into his or her own hands, it is the power to learn. It is the one essential skill we must teach our children if they are to adapt to a constantly changing world. A broad general education and love of learning may be more important than specific skills that will soon be out of date.

Money is like gas in the car—you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road—but a successful business or a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations.

have yet to see a convincing case made that the costs of dealing with climate change aren’t principally the costs of protecting incumbent industries.

asking yourself “What happens if this goes on?” is a great way to prepare for the future—