Is Big Business Your Friend?

Automation And Your Future

It’s been about five minutes since I last warned everyone about this.

Check out this video brought to me via way of boxer/philosopher Ed Latimore:

Let me tell you about some of the wonderful things that this robot army can do:

• 60 Robots moved $500m worth of merchandise on Alibaba’s Singles Day
• They are powered (in terms of instruction) by Wifi
• They can move 500kg at once
• Charge in 5 minutes for a total of 4-5 hours work time (so need to charge for 30 minutes a day)
• They can move in any direction and won’t collide with any other worker bots
• They have a 3x better output than they did four months ago
• Alibaba owns the whole infrastructure
• The need for human work has decreased by 70%

In short, if you’re Alibaba then this is fantastic and innovative technology.

Big Business Is Not Your Friend

Just look at how that video is framed. “Wow! Isn’t that awesome how that warehouse does all that with some glorified Roombas?”

One company owns the entire infrastructure. One company in one densely populated country ruled by one party. A densely populated country that increasingly doesn’t need its dense human population to run.

But let’s not delve into politics here except to say “70% less human work” is framed as a positive. It is. Unless you’re in the 70% of workers that are no longer needed. Then it’s time to retrain and get back on the job market and compete for a diminished amount of work.

Ok, we’ll take a step back. Here’s my point.

These titanic companies which increasingly own the entire infrastructure do not care about you aside from your ability to add to their profit line. This is a problem for you.

Forget any political, societal or big picture issues here. The job market contracts, the division between economic cases grows and wherever you sit on that ladder, these constraints make life harder.

I’ll address a couple of common sticking points here, because they always come up.

You Can’t Just Say, “Everyone Will Fix The Robots”

This blog is about solutions as opposed to problems. The problem with the automation apocalypse is that many, many people assume one thing:

“Technological progress is always happening look at how steam trains were replaced by the ones we have now!”

This leads inevitably to:

“All the people displaced need to retrain.”

This is a reasonable argument. Everyone will have to think about how their skills work and will work into the future. If you work in a warehouse, it’s time to get out of it.

However, it’s a simplification of a problem. The issues being:

1. Most warehouse workers aren’t going to have the capacity to become programmers (Take from that what you will)
2. When you have an army of robots that can work 24/7 and at greater capacity than humans, it’ll never be economical to have human workers
3. There are fundamentally fewer jobs in AI and tech than there have ever been in manufacturing

That’s at a ground level. You will have to retrain and probably constantly retrain as all this unfolds. But it won’t be enough.

The argument, “Well we’ll just have to do something else” seems to come from people who conveniently have no solutions. “But there’ll be innovation!” they say; the innovation is the video above. Nobody is trying to innovate a way to make things less efficient and human-labour intensive.

We’ll talk about what to do in the next section, but I just want to address one other dumb argument I’ve heard multiple times when I’ve talked about this.

Hating big business does not make you a communist.

People have told me that I’m a communist because “free market this” and “free market that” and “if you oppose big business you obviously want the government to step in.”

This is a stupid argument so I’m not going to spend much time on it. Look into the major investors in FB, Amazon and Google. Ask yourself what politicians have to say on the matters discussed above. Then think about how competition actually works when there are effective monopolies on infrastructure.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll have a clearer idea of some of the larger issues. Now, you might assume that a socialist redistribution of wealth is the answer. You might decide radical decentralisation is the answer. Or you might decide that there’s somewhere in between or a total other solution.

Either way though none of those solutions seem to be coming to pass, so it’s best to actually do something as opposed to waiting for either Utopia or Dystopia.

You Have To Prepare: Instability

So let’s get on to the basics of how to prepare for automation quickly eroding the job market. I’ll assume a few things:

1. You have reasonable tech literacy (I don’t mean programming, but if you don’t know how to work the internet, you need to.)
2. You’re willing to learn new skills
3. Being a corporate overlord isn’t your plan
4. Nor is being a political elite
5. You’re not a genius, in the top percentile of wealth and aren’t some super gifted human in some way

Here’s what I recommend:

1. You need multiple skills that can lead to income
2. Multiple streams of income are a must
3. Basic financial literacy and investment knowledge is a must too

These things are important because massive job losses – even if you have a stable job – cause instability in the economy as a whole.

Instability can be profitable and it can also be a nightmare.

Now, I won’t get survival-prepper on everyone because I don’t think you should buy a bunker in the woods. But it absolutely pays to do two things:

1. Prepare for eventualities in order of likelihood – disaster-wise
2. Prepare for opportunities to present themselves

You might lose your job. You might not be able to live in the same place long term. Maybe you’ll end up looking for someone else who loses their job.

These are all likely things when you think about the course of your lifetime.

Step One: Understand The Architecture

Look at the way the world is moving and you’ll see it’s going in one direction. Whether it’s utopian or dystopian, we’re moving to a Cloud-world where everything is interconnected and your life is determined by the buttons you click or don’t click.

If you don’t understand future changes, then you are at a disadvantage. Again, I don’t mean, “You have to become a programmer.”

But I mean if you’re a white collar worker who spends most of his day on Excel sheets, then your industry is changing beyond recognition. Which way it goes is something you have to learn otherwise you’ll lose out.

Even if you think, “I’m a lumberjack. I cut trees and that’s going to be ok for fifty years…” and we’ll assume the example works (even though it doesn’t) do you want to be the Dad who doesn’t know how Facebook works? Maybe you’ll get a twelve year old daughter and she’s talking to who-knows but it’s certainly not you, because you don’t.

In a wider business sense; your industry will change.

How will a completely automated logistical flow change the industry you work in? Because that’s what we’re looking at.

It doesn’t matter what you decide to do, but it matters that you know what’s happening in advance. If you don’t, then you’re relying heavily on fortune favouring you.

Step Two: Hard Work Done; Opportunities

Alright. If you’ve done the above step, then I have good news: You mostly don’t need my help.

When you know what to expect, it’s easy to gaps in the market. It’s easy to plan in the medium term.

Here’s what I think about automation and how you should use it best for the future.

1. You have to have that understanding and use the infrastructure to your advantage
2. You have to have something outside of that system which forms your core proposition

For the first, let’s talk about some quick things you can do:

1. Learn about AWS. If you run a company, you can use global infrastructure as opposed to building your own
2. Think of gig economy websites as lead generation magnets. That means you use them as bulletin boards for extra skills and things you can do. Take the clients from them. They aren’t your friend.
3. Sell on all of these platforms. Use fulfilment services. Use Alibaba to find product manufacturers.

The second part is the most important though.

The key for stability in your career, business and life: Your core propositions need to exist outside of the infrastructure that someone else owns.

You want to have money (or, not even necessarily money nowadays) that exists outside the system. Hold assets which have value without requiring anyone else’s custody of those assets.

You need to have skills that don’t require the system.

Essentially, if you think about your skillset now and wonder, “Can I be replaced?” then it’s time to upgrade your skills.

If your money is stored in some payment processor that can shut you down because you tweet something stupid, then it’s time to rethink that.

Use the system. Don’t let it use you.