Is the dotcom bubble about to burst (again)? | Technology | The Guardian:
I have been saying this for the last 5 years. People don’t realize how much effort is going into replacing jobs. And the only options will be ones that can’t be outsourced or involve supporting tech.
“And if it isn’t a bubble, if the world really has changed, and economic laws too, and everything keeps going up and up and up, it’s still the little people who’ll suffer. The great swaths of us whose services will no longer be required in a coming era that is just around the corner. In the past 18 months, all of us who live in cities around the world have watched as taxi drivers have protested and lost their livelihoods and Uber has swept in and cleaned up, taking 20% of every fare along the way. Don’t think this is going to stop at taxis – where Uber is going to end up is more or less anyone’s guess. Last month I met the head of Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics faculty, whose entire department has just been poached by the firm. Including him.
First they came for the booksellers and I did not speak out because I was not a bookseller. Next they came for the taxi drivers etc etc. Then baristas, divorce lawyers, artists, journalists… there are not going to be an awful lot of jobs of any description left. How any of us are going to be earning a living in 20 years’ time, in 10 years’ time, is something that most of us aren’t thinking about. In this light, building a startup that has a 90% chance of failure looks like a pretty smart option.
“I think there is going to be massive job destruction in the next 10 to 20 years,” says Sam Altman. “I think we are already seeing it. Technology increases wealth but it also concentrates it. There’s a huge coming threat to all of us.”
Companies in Silicon Valley think differently from the rest of us. Their ambition is of a different order. Their rate of growth is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And it’s in San Francisco, where technology meets the real world, that we’re starting to see the beginnings of what this clash of civilisations will look like. Or as Altman puts it: “If founders in San Francisco can build a new $50bn company in five years but the city can’t approve a single new housing development in that time, that’s a mismatch.”
It’s all a mismatch. We and the great tech world we’re building. But then I probably would say that. My industry is just one of hundreds in the throes of the Great Disruption. Yours too, possibly. Even if you haven’t realised it yet. It might not just be startups that need to learn to pivot.
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