How To Become A Cyborg (Part One)
Let’s talk about the future tech landscape.
I’ve spent the day on two things; writing up the newsletter, and playing around with my dictation set up.
I use Dragon Professional, and when I say, “use,” I mean, “try it out every month or so because I realise the technology is the future but it’s a massive pain in the neck in reality.”
And that’s an interesting duality that we’ve got now. Technology progresses quickly, and even being a young, tech-minded and somewhat intelligent guy, I find it’s tough to stay up to date and take advantage.
Cryptocurrency was the first time I thought, “you know what… I’m too old for this.” And I won’t regale you with the story about how I was in my mid-twenties and it was a couple of years before the boom and I could’a been a millionaire because you’ve all had to endure the sales letters and blah blah blah.
The point isn’t cryptocurrency is the future, (I don’t think it is in its current state,) or that I’m an idiot luddite, (I’m not…)
But the first mini-point here is that you are going to have to pick the tech battles you want to win in the future. It’s not going to be possible to be the tech-head who understands all technology. You can be a crypto-expert or an affiliate marketing monster with tracking software, split-testers and automated marketing: but you probably can’t be an expert at both.
So, pick your tech battles.
For instance, I realised sometime during the crypto-boom that I was looking for massive returns on a technology platform that I didn’t really get and couldn’t be bothered to learn. So I pulled those experiments, and instead thought about how to get massive returns doing something I did know: publishing.
This brings me back around to Dragon and Tech.
The Scenario
Let’s talk about your job or business.
Chances are, automation is already affecting your job, and it’s definitely affecting your industry. It’s probably making it easier, but there’s a double-edged thing going on there: your job will likely be automated in the near future.
Happy-clappy folks will tell you that that’s OK, because everyone can retrain and what we’re experiencing is no different to when horses replaced cars. Which is a weak hippy analysis made slightly less comforting when you consider that the horse was the labour that was replaced by the machine, and so you aren’t the car drive in the new scenario; you’re the horse.
I’m a big fan of the game of life as a metaphor, and often say that you have to play the board in front of you, not the one you would ideally have. Here’s the real scenario:
- We know that automation is going to affect everyone and is doing right now
- The promised retraining, miners learning to code, and replacement work for everyone is not on the cards right now
Ditto secured pensions, guaranteed income promises and other politician-laden things that are anticipated in the future: you can’t bet on them. They don’t exist. Assuming you’ll get them is playing the board as you want it to be, not as it is.
So what’s the solution?
Do What You Can!
Not everyone is going to be a programmer. Most can take advantage of the programs that are out there. And you need to be doing this.
Take me for instance; I’m a very good writer, (as dictated by the open, free market.)
I can write at a rate of maybe 2,000 words per hour, with typing and planning. This is incredibly high, and very few people can do this, if we’re honest.
I’ve been testing out approaches with dictation software, and other software things that pull templates together. (These I’ve cobbled together myself, and are rubbish but I’m looking for proof of concept.)
Today, playing with that new approach, I “wrote” 1000+ words in ten minutes. These were high quality, publishable words.
Once I get this down, I’ll easily be able to probably triple my output.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy; it requires a ton of planning, a couple of spreadsheets, a cobbled-together HTML “program” and dealing with Dragon’s dictation software – and you can spend as much time fixing that as you do creating with it.
But this is effectively what we’re up against as humans.
AI Isn’t Your Biggest Enemy
I know that I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: when people talk about the automation apocalypse, they often sneer and joke about Terminators killing us all or The Matrix dystopias where we’re all plugged in and the robots who are super smart control everything.
This is, by my estimation, a way off in the future, if it’s even possible. I’d argue probably not but we’ll see.
It’s not the point.
The point is that you don’t have to worry about a robot taking your job. You have to worry about a human with one hundred robots doing one hundred jobs at the rate that one person can do one job.
If I can write, and I can’t yet and might not be able to ever, 6,000 words an hour, then that’s a book a day. Or a niche site every two days; five sales letters a day and/or enough tweets to make Ed Latimore and the “100+ tweets a day” crew blush.
That’s the reality of automation in the future.
And my only answer right now is to hop on the cyborg train.