Where we are

If you take a bit of time to consider how we are evolving as a nation, there are a number of trends that are very obvious. The amount of labor required to actually produce goods keeps decreasing as we deploy more and more technology and other productivity improvements. In the product delivery cycle, we need less people to produce just about everything, need to store less of it as we have improved logistics, need less people to sell it as we have improved on-line commerce. Where you used to get significant information from salespeople who might even visit you, now that is becoming unnecessary as more and more information is available on the internet.

The people who we do still need in this cycle need to have more skills than they once did. They need to be machine operators or tech gurus, able to provide value. Those with the right skills are in demand and since I think they will remain that way. Yes we will improve training, but the creative thinking the new society requires has always been in short supply and there is no reason to believe it will become commonplace.

We have also seen the same developments in the service industries which actually account for more jobs in this country than the goods producing industries. Lower skilled service level jobs are disappearing as artifical intelligence get better and better. When I was younger, to open a broderage account required actual interaction with real people, and was a bit time consuming. Further, transactions also required actual interaction to give your order to a broker. Now, we have tools that allow you to open an account, fund it, make trades and get informaion without actually talking to anyone. I assume that at some point a person is involved, but I guarantee one person can handle an exponentially greater number of accounts than in the past. The so called robo signing crisis in the Mortgage industry is simply an example of our judicial system failing to keep up with technology. Inevitably, the laws will adjust to the new way things get processed. And yes, some mistakes will be made, but trust me, there will be fewer mistakes than we used to have using people, although technology does have the capability to make outrageous mistakes that most people would never make.

So, all these trends tell me that we need less, more highly skilled people. What then about the people who simply don't fit. Now don't get me wrong, there will always be some jobs for relatively unskilled people in many areas that don't lend themselves to technology, although think about things like traffic enforcement where we now manage to fine people without actual human intervention using cameras. Creative people will find ways to transform more and more things to be more productive. We clearly will be left with a percentage of the population that simply don't have the skills required to fit.

The only real opportunities for many of these people is become true service providers. I believe we will see, in fact I think we already see it, a world where we find it easier and cheaper to buy services that require little skill but do requrie time. Shopping, cleaning, chores are areas that at one time were handled by servants. Most of us are not going to hire servants per se but you can hire companies that will shop for you, clean your house, do your chores in a sort of on-demand way, making it affordable for many more of us.