Tag: economics

Post Covid Possibilities – COVID-19 series

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

At time like these no one has all the answers as to what’s next. What is useful however, is asking a lot of questions. The art of scenario planning and being ready for a number of plausible trajectories and future realities. So I’ve bunched them into the of categories Data, The Economy, Work and Society.

So here it is – Post Covid Possibilities from the Sammatron. Consider, discuss and debate.

The Data & Surveillance:

Digital Sovereignty – Governments around the world (excluding China & USA) will realise that they don’t have digital sovereignty They’ve essentially been colonised by ‘Big tech’ – in that they don’t own or control the most powerful tools in the modern economy – Digital Infrastructure. Hardware / data / social / search – they’ve had to rely Big Tech (Alphabet / Apple / Facebook / Amazon / Microsoft) to gain access to data to control the virus. It will (should) facilitate nationalisation of digital infrastructure and or create a desire to build out and create their own versions.

Permanent Surveillance – A new era of digital surveillance will enter the economy and become very sticky. All our personal connections & locations and data will now be a permanent fixture in Gov. databases. Providing existential risk for overreach. Algorithms matched with other existing data sets will provide near perfect summaries of most citizens.

Biometric Scanning – Will be a new norm like scanning for weapons except this time they won’t be checking for weapons outside of our bodies, but the weapons inside our bodies – potential viruses and infections. Biometric testing will be present on public transport, stadiums, schools, universities and workplaces. We’ll walk through temperature sensors, breathe into analysers, look into iris scanners and be monitored by any other device you can imagine.

Big Tech Anti-Trust – Governments around the world will realise that they had to go cap in hand to big tech to use their resources to implement tracking and report on the covid situation. They are the only sector to have gained financial ground and market capitalisation during the crisis. This will further ensconce policy calling for their break up and or nationalisation.

The Economy:

Securing the Supply chain – There will be a push to have a stronger domestic supply chain and local production in most countries. Countries have realised how exposed they are if they don’t produce essential goods – such as food, medicine, health care materials, transport, energy etc. Local Manufacturing will make a comeback and be facilitated by new levels of A.I and automation.

De-globalisation – Married with borders being restricted and closed in many cases for an elongated period of time, we can expect a decade of de-globalisation. This shift already aligns with current US and UK political trajectories (Notably Brexit) and will accelerate the trend. Expect manufacturing and production to strengthen in home markets as a respond to supply chain risk and geopolitical and racial undertones.

Post-Efficiency Economics – Our obsession with efficiency of everything, and leaving no margin for error or ‘fat’ will be exposed as flawed. In the new economy we can expect a balance of safety to be built into systems which are inefficient on purpose so we can cope with Black Swan events such as COVID-19.

End of the Consistent Taxation Decline: The Ragan inspired era of reduced tax and trickle-down economics will be exposed as a lie that favours the rich and drives inequality. Due to necessity taxes will be raised globally regardless of what Liberal and Republican governments currently claim. We’ll realise that tax actually provides a base for economic stability and severely needed structural investment.

Nationalisation of Infrastructure – A new form of civic federalism will emerge. We’ll start to revalue to importance of infrastructure not run with a profit incentive, but the service incentive of the populace. Starting with Healthcare & Education, people will realise natural monopolies like Energy, Roads, Public Transport, Telecoms, may be better held in public hands. We’ll start to value access and control of critical infrastructure as the fabric of a civil society. A renewed respect for our trusted Institutions will also emerge.

A New Frugality – In both business and consumer spending. Financial fear associated with more frequent shocks will reduce the incentives to take on debt and aim for capital growth. This will impact corporate investment, consumer spending and house prices. The end of mass consumer culture could eventuate. A post-depression era style conservatism could emerge. The economy will be driven more by yield, than growth.

Bailout Pushback – Citizens will rally against the Gov. bailing out publicly traded stocks, and call it out for what it is Cronyism – or shall we call it – Corporate Socialism. This time the crisis has really hit street level and any bailout of a failed firm that isn’t an essential service will be heavily derided. This crisis jump start traditional two way capitalism, The take your wins, and swallow your losses – the antithesis of the GFC – where private profits and end up public losses via bail outs.

The Philanthropic Charade Exposed – billionaires who use philanthropy as a PR strategy will be exposed as the fraud they are. The tiny percentages of the wealth they offer up, pale in comparison to what they ought be paying in taxes, and the fact that philanthropy falsely allows rich people to decide where we need the money, (Choosing to give where it suits their business & political interests) instead of letting Gov. allocated their resources. All the while generating political favour for them.

Work:

Shrinking Offices – Companies will realise they don’t need as much office space. They’ll loosen the reigns on where office staff work, and take the financial advantage of having smaller offices people can come to for interactions and meetings X times per week. They’ll have collaboration spaces, not cubicles. This will negatively impact city real estate prices. The work from home revolution will accelerate.

Front Line Workers – Increased respect for healthcare workers has emerged, but sadly those in low skilled front-line work (grocery clerks, warehouse workers, drivers et al) continue to be put at risk with little safety considerations and zero financial recourse. We can expect logistical front end workers – the unsung heroes of COVD-19 – to push back hard and maybe even ask for danger money. Could unions re-emerge to protect gig workers?

Teachers, Nurses, Paramedics, childcare worker Revaluation – Social carers of the informed, young and sick might finally get the pay and respect they deserve, at a minimum they’ll have a stronger argument to their cases forward. We can live without many services, and these aren’t on the list.

Telemedicine Gets Real – Covid-10 will been seen as the long overdue birth of telemedicine. Our current necessity has provided proof that many of our healthcare needs can be performed remotely – firstly with GP consults going online– and eventually with robotic surgery becoming normalised.

Scientific Community – Expertise will start to get the respect it deserves. Even though some politicians have been working against their advice in many cases. Because this case is real, and has an immediate and direct impact (bodies piling up) – the truth will emerge that scientific advice must be adhered to in a modern society. We can hope that science will usurp the idolatry of celebrity and billionaire philanthropy. Throw us a bone why don’t ya Bezos!

Social Impact:

Personal Space – The handshake and kiss hello, and even the Bro Hug might evaporate from society. It’s already being espoused as a good time to stop it forever by healthcare experts. We can expect post corona social interactions to only be quasi-physical.

Increased Authoritarianism – Given the fear and solution authoritarian rule game to the virus, it opens a space for the acceptance of authoritarian rule. We’ll shift away from hyper individualism and the corporatization of society. We’ll revalue structure, control and certainty of risk avoidance.

Strengthened Family Units – Extended family lock downs will strengthen the value we put on the family unit and provide a war like and permanent bonding experience which will be generational and strengthen the value we put on the nuclear family. Historical evidence suggest that authoritarian regimes have stronger family units as a counter balance.

Digital Divide Exposed – COVID has exposed a digital divide amongst demographics. The most financially disadvantaged workers are also those who can’t work from home, and tend to be customer facing. Home schooling has also created a dearth for less well-off families whose kids lack access to basic technology to assist in home learning. This will become a focus of Gov. to ensure internet access and access to portable hardware such as laptops becomes part of the standard educational resources provided by Gov.

Re-Birth of Essentialism – Covid-19 have proven everything outside of food, housing, energy and healthcare are largely optional. By learning what we can live without a new era of essentialism will both be a cause and result of the new post covid frugality.

Decline in Celebrity Culture – The moved towards essentialism, will be a start reminder of the little value celebrity adds to our daily live. With a lack of production qualities in their covid-19 media output we’ve realised few celebrities have special talents – the celebrity herd will thin and influencers will see they are the most expendable as marketing budgets get cut.

Revival of Public Spaces – The increased usage of public parks and spaces will provide a new interest in protecting these resources and upgrading their facilities.

Cracks appear in Life Optimisation Movement – The idea of Life hacking and optimisations emanating out of Silicon Valley will become exposed as a flawed way to turn yourself into an economic robot. We’ve been reminded that just being and having freedom to move around is far more important than using digital tools to track how many steps you do, how well you sleep and counting other measures our bodies already track for us.

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Stay safe & keep thinking, Steve. 

Securing the Supply Chain – COVID-19 series

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

If there is one thing we’ve realised it’s how interconnected and physical our world really is. Digital can only substitute so much. With 70 years of unimpeded global growth and globalisation we’ve all become a little complacent. So I’m offering two thought experiments on possible natural and technological disasters. Two aren’t just possible, but probable.

Scenario 1: Floods in China.

Let’s imagine China faces an unprecedented period of rain due to climate change. More rain than any location has ever had in recorded history. The next result is nationwide floods, and damage to ports, which need to be close for repairs that could take 12-18 months to fix. The supply chain gets choked. Nothing can get in our out of China which isn’t on an airplane.

The global economy which has come to rely on China as its low cost factory will be in trouble again. While this wouldn’t be as calamitous as COVID-19 – it would put a bigger dint in the the economy than the GFC did. We are not ready for this. 

Scenario 2: Global Internet Virus.

Now imagine a new form of artificial intelligence develops its own agenda. Not a walking talking terminator style robot – but something more more immediate and plausible. An A.I, driven virus which is manages to take down every desktop, laptop, phone, server farm, terminal, and device connected to the internet across the entire world. And this AI virus is so clever it can work around every safety measure and firewall design into the web. The virus becomes a type of learning organism. No one knows how it started, where it came from, or how to stop it.

All we know is that we can no longer use the internet or any computing device to feed ourselves, keep our houses warm and keep people healthy. This too would impact the developed world in an unimaginably large way. We are not ready for this.

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Both scenarios would require levels of independence and redundancy most developed economies have let lapse in the name of efficiency. A stark reminder that a robust economic system needs design elements which are inefficient on purpose.

Definitions During a Crisis – COVID-19 series

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

(12 min read – long, but worth it) 

Historian and author Yuval Harari says that if something doesn’t feel, then it isn’t real.  While an economy can grow or decline – it’s an abstract concept. Many of the parts that make an economy are real – like people – but much of it is just aggregated concepts for which measurements are possible.

Weirdly, it seems many governments (Australia and the USA come to mind) are more concerned with abstract concepts than real people’s needs. So with that in mind, I’ve decided to bust out some truth bombs and break down what is really happening during this crisis.

The Economy – The word economics can be traced back to mean household management. Of course, if a household has no resources, it can’t participate in the wider economy. This would also flow through to business to business transactions, because the only reason they exist is to facilitate the production of goods and services for other households as well. Ultimately it all starts and ends with the household. How quickly our federal government forgot that if we want the economy to survive, we need to go back to the original meaning of economics and help out households. If that means replacing incomes temporarily, then the government should do this. The best thing our government could do right now is think bottom up, not top down. If people have resources (money), everything else will be OK in the long run. If the government helps businesses first, then they’ve forgotten why businesses actually exist. Go to the source. In times where efficiency of resource allocation is desperately needed, cutting out the middle man is a damn good place to start.

Capitalism – We don’t live in a capitalist economy, but a mixed economy where we have a financial competition backed up with social protections. That’s what our taxes and governments are for. Right now the pendulum needs to swing very far to the side of socialism. We’ve always had publicly provided, healthcare, pensions, disability and unemployment benefits. What we need right now is a strategy or short term government policy that could save lives. Any murmur of dissent from so-called ‘capitalists’ needs to be pushed back hard by all of us.

The Corporation – A corporation is a legal entity set up to reduce the personal risk of people who own it. If corporations are designed to protect people, it might be time ignore the structure and think of the people they are made up of. Save the people and the corporations will be fine. If this sounds ridiculously simple, it actually is.

Yield – Our economy for too long has been based on capital growth instead of yield. We’re about to transition from growth to yield. People and companies have been obsessed with acquiring things in the hope they’ll be worth more tomorrow, simply because there is demand for it rather than the fruit it bears. Growth should be a function of expected future yield, but that seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the line. It’s about to make a serious comeback in the sharemarket, real estate and pretty much anything we invest in. The market will start to ask what’s the yield and base their decisions on that. This is a good thing.

Trickle Down Economics – This is the flawed idea that if we reduce taxes and costs for businesses and the wealthy, it will stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term. The reality is that it’s called trickle down, because the 99% end up with only a trickle. The clue was in the name, and yet those who divined this strategy managed to sell it to the world. We are about to see it doesn’t work and the truth is that our economy is bottom up – it always has been. Governments around the world will realise very quickly that unless you replace lost incomes at the household level (like Denmark are doing), we are headed for a deep and long depression.

Bailouts – If Australia or any other country bails out an industry, it should be a buyout instead. Bailouts are a hoax where the stockholder get to profit in good times and make tax payers take the downside. It’s a case of private profit and public losses. If a firm is important enough for a government to bailout, then it should be nationalised or at a minimum, the government should take equity positions to the equivalent value of their market cap at the time of the bailout. These equity positions should take the form of preferred convertible stock.

Here’s an example: Qantas has performed share buybacks (when a company buys its own stock to take it off the market and boost the share price, benefiting existing shareholders and often bonus-incentivised executives) of over a billion dollars in the last 2 years. If they hadn’t done the buybacks, they would have a war chest of over a billion dollars in their balance sheet for moments like these. In an industry plagued with Black Swan events like this every decade or so, it would have been a more prudent management strategy. I bet Allan Joyce won’t give back any of his $20 million in non salary benefits he received last financial year.

Unemployment Statistics – For a long time the ‘underemployed’ (people who want more work than they currently have) have not been regarded as unemployed. I’ve even read predictions as recently as this week claiming unemployment might even get to 11-15%. These unemployment predictions are laughable. Get ready for 30-50% unemployment. In times of great change we need to get our heads out of the spreadsheet and into the real world. Most things happen on the street before they can be measured empirically in any meaningful way. Maybe the people coming up with these numbers should go and ask a broad sample of 100 people if they are currently working… then they’d get some real numbers.

De-globalisation – We can also expected a re-consideration of running global supply chains. The true national risk of every country’s supply chain will be exposed during this crisis. You better hope like hell your country is good at making food, generating energy and has a good healthcare system. Post COVID-19, we will see many countries taking steps to secure supply chains on vital industries. We are learning really quickly the difference between essential and optional. Sorry, Team Kardashian.

Economic Shock – It’s important we understand that this isn’t an economic disaster or shock, but a natural disaster. The consequences of which are different. If we thwart the virus quickly, there’s a big chance we will come out of this economic trough more quickly than we would if it were an economic-driven recession. If it lasts more than a couple of seasons it will shift the culture, change how we spend and invest in a longitudinal way. Human culture in every corner of the world is a function of their natural environment. In a highly populated city-based connected economy, this could change social and financial behaviour for a very long time.

Natural Monopolies & Utilities – Countries that still control their utilities and natural monopolies will handle COVID-19 a lot better than those with largely privatised utilities. If Australia still owned and controlled its water, energy and telecoms, it could simply pause all bills for x period of time. What could be a massive financial relief for households is now not possible.

The good news is that many countries will rightly reconsider the re-nationalisation of vital infrastructure. This would not only allow flexibility in times like these, but allow build-outs of leading edge technology as most of these assets are going through a technological upheaval. It would also provide secure forms of employment and training which matches market needs.  I’ve written about this extensively before.

Power of Big Tech – Ironically, the companies benefiting the most from this crisis are those who need it least: Big Tech businesses like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. They already too powerful will only become even more powerful after this event. Just yesterday, the Australian Government announced a new app specifically to communicate with constituents about the crisis. It’s a nice idea – but even our Government had to abide by the rules of Big Tech and rely on Apple and Google to make it available on their app store. They also created a WhatsApp tool to extend their reach, relying on Facebook. Post COVID-19, many countries will realise they do not have and desperately need digital sovereignty

Discrimination –  This disease doesn’t discriminate. From princes to Prime Ministers, no one is immune. We’ve also realised the difference between essential services and optional indulgences. Health, housing, food, energy and humble logistics. It’s worth sparing a moment of thought for people working in supermarkets and hospitals, and putting themselves at risk for us.

It’s moments like this we realise that we are all in this together.

The Economics of Health

Posted on by Steve Sammartino
There are lots of business and life lessons emerging from the global Coronavirus pandemic. The first is simple, without our health, there is no economy. Health is the ultimate life goal and that needs to be atop of our decision hierarchy.
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Getting Priorities Right: The Australian F1 Grand Prix – This needs to be cancelled immediately.  It is the opposite of what every medical professional is recommending – a large gathering of people. As an economic rationalist, the best long term economic strategy is to be conservative. Let’s listen to health professionals. Let’s over react. The consequences of an under reaction could be catastrophic and cost more lives. The short term economic gain of an event, will certainly result in a longer term economic cost. Economic short term-ism never ends well.

The fact that our government has released an ‘economic stimulus package’ tells the story of their priorities. They’ve got the order of things back to front. They ought be protecting health now, and the economy later. Certainly protect the financially vulnerable in real time, but the best way to do that is focusing on stopping the spread by flattening the infection curve as quickly as possible. See below;

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Practice what you Preach: My advice above is not coming from the cheap seats. My work includes delivering keynote speeches at large public events around the world. The cancellations are coming in thick and fast, and I welcome it. There is a real economic cost to me, but I’d rather we reduce the overall impact sooner, and get back to normal quicker. Health now, business later.

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Respect your Customers: I have contracts with many of my customers. When they call to cancel or postpone work, I ignore the contract and focus on the person, the situation and how we can find a solution together. If there was ever a time to gain loyalty from the people you deal with, then it is in times of rapid change and uncertainty. People remember how you treat them in times of social stress.

At the end of the day, global issues like this effect everyone, but we get to choose how we react.

The Decade in Tech

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

It’s pretty easy to forget how much a new technology changes our lives once it’s adopted. Sure, some new technologies are like shooting stars, but some change everything forever. So, for posterity’s sake, I’ve laid out a list of new technologies that changed how we do things, and maybe even the direction of our species. Enjoy!

2010

What happened: Google leaves China + Uber launches in App Store

Why it mattered: Google leaving China was the start of a New Cold War. China pushed hard to create clones of Western online services and even made better ones – see WeChat. This time the Cold War isn’t an arms race, but a race for quantum and data supremacy. The weird part is that USA and China both surveil their citizens, though the Chinese government isn’t making a secret of tracking their citizens, while the USA is pretending it’s about security when clearly it’s not.

Uber hitting the App Store was about much more than putting taxis on notice for terrible service. It was the start of the immediacy economy – anything and everything on demand, delivered to wherever we happen to be. The start of a massive GPS-driven logistics and mobility revolution.

2011

What happened: Twitch is launched + Steve Jobs dies

Why it mattered: For the uninitiated, Twitch is an online streaming service to watch people play video games. If it sounds ridiculous to you, then just remember that in many cultures we gather in giant stadiums to watch teams of adult humans dressed in co-ordinated attire kick dead animal skins through white sticks (football). It really was the start of the meta-economy where online activities are starting to gather layers and blur with the ‘real world’.

The death of Steve Jobs cemented his legacy as a quasi-Jesus figure for tech fans the world over. The problem was this created a dangerous idolatry of any innovation big tech companies launched at us. From this, the negative externalities have been ignored for far too long – including the massive issues we are now facing with Big Tech’s monopoly powers on par with nation states.

2012

What happened: Facebook buys Instagram for $US 1 billion + Tinder launches

Why it mattered: An open and fair internet took a massive hit when Facebook bought Instagram. This was the start of a serious economic consolidation of power while regulators were asleep at the wheel. The fact that we have a single ‘media’ organisation – and yes they are a media company – with massive influence over 2.4 billion constituents should make all of us lose sleep at night.

We’ve been finding mates online and in personal columns for decades, but Tinder normalised digital as a preamble to the physical meetup process. Meeting online went from weird to just plain ordinary.

2013

What happened: Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations + Facebook goes public with IPO.

Why it mattered: Snowden’s revelations of a mass surveillance programme targeting US citizens was the first time the wider population saw the downside of digital. While most people still don’t care, or at least act like they don’t, it did signal that privacy and security will eventually become the workplace health and safety of the modern era. If we are fortunate, it might spawn a new industry to protect our civil rights, while society and lawmakers catch up with the the reality of the risks.

Facebook goes public. Interestingly, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sends a letter to shareholders claiming that its mission of connecting (controlling) the world is more important than profit – but he fails to mention in said letter that he can never be removed from office or voted out. Just think of this: Mark Zuckerberg is in control of more people than anyone, ever, in history. To date, its market capitalisation has now increased fourfold since the IPO. Welcome to the Zuckerberg Dynasty.

2014

What happened: Facebook buys WhatsApp + Amazon Echo is launched

Why it mattered: It’s strange to me that Facebook was able to make an acquisition valued at $US 16 billion and still not capture the attention of antitrust regulation. They also said it was ‘impossible’ to integrate FB and WhatsApp services and data. Then, just like magic, they were able to do it a couple of years later, lolz… see 2012 above.

The launch of the voice services with Amazon Echo will be remembered in the future as the time when we truly started to communicate with AI. This was that moment. This will be when it got real.

2015

What happened: Google driverless vehicle hits the road + SpaceX lands first rocket

Why it mattered: When Google (now Waymo) put its driverless car out for all to see on a real road, industrialists sat up and took notice. We realised that cars were very quickly becoming rolling computers, that the digital world now shaped the physical world too. That was the moment that every business knew it too was now in the technology business.

The Space Race was once the exclusive domain of Big Gov. After a few decades of neglect, it has been miraculously revived as a private industry. If anything – this should signify the era of the bodacious billionaire where they have as much (or more?) power than elected governments.

2016

What happened: Donald Trump elected President + Theranos implodes

Why it mattered: In my view Trump is an inevitable symptom of crazy times and a radical pace of change. But it was the moment the wider world realised that news isn’t news anymore. We all live in echo chambers of existing belief systems and our minds can be hacked by the power of algorithms.

When blood diagnosis health startup Theranos was exposed as a scam – everyone started to understand that not all unicorns would live up to their hype, valuations or even their product promises. It was time to be very aware that in the real physical world beyond photo sharing apps, it’s very important that products actually work.

2017

What happened: Cambridge Analytica scandal + Bitcoin bubble

Why it mattered: The Cambridge Analytica scandal particularly annoyed me because it wasn’t the Cambridge Analytica scandal – it was actually a Facebook scandal. I don’t know how The Zuck pulled it off, but it was a stunning exercise showcasing the dark arts of blame deflection.

The bursting of the Bitcoin and crypto bubble was one we had to have. I liken it to the dot-com bubble of 1999. Cryptocurrency too will come back and change our lives, and this new financial system might change the world even more than the internet has.

Here’s the history of Bitcoin price:

2018

What happened: GDPR + Deep Fakes arrive

Why it mattered: The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) put surveillance capitalism on notice. While the opening gambit was small and probably affected the competitors of Big Tech more than those it was aimed at, it was the start of a movement to give power back to the people.

The first flurry of deepfakes hit the world and blew minds. But just wait until they are free and anyone can do it. It might just spell the end of audio visual truth. A few years from now, we’ll be asking people if they were actually there to prove it happened. This could put a massive schism into the entire web and anything news-related.

2019

What happened: Antitrust actions commence on Big Tech + Greta Thunberg named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year

Why it mattered: Antitrust actions taking place this year are a classic turning of the tide and the realisation we are in the middle of a gilded technopoly. The next decade will be one of regulation versus innovation – with the former taking precedence over the latter. It won’t be about stopping or slowing down technology, rather about civilising it so we can have progress for all humanity, not just the fortunate few.

Greta showed the world than even a child can command attention on issues vital for humanity. It’s amazing what can be said when words are not guided by vested interests. Here’s what I know for sure: we have all the technology we need today to have a low carbon emission economy. The kicker is that such a shift to a new energy model is probably the only way to maintain the economic growth the grownups seem to love so much.

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For me this is an era where the development of technology won’t slow – but its implementation might and it will certainly be more considered, competitive and wide-reaching for whom it benefits. I can’t wait to push deeper into the next decade and help build a future we all deserve.

The unexplainable gig

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Today I was in a little talk circle among a few friends at the PauseFest event. We all made some introductions to each other and then proceeded to discuss what we did for a living. Then something weird happened. None of us had simple answers.

It turns out all of us are ‘projecteers‘. We do a number of small projects and tasks for a variety of customers. We create, think, write, speak, consult, write code and build strategy for people and companies who need it. The cool thing is that none of us could explain it because: all of us have so much variety in what we do. Of course, those who need to know get it. While this is a small audience, it’s also the only audience that matters.

It got me thinking about how much of an advantage it is that we can’t explain our ‘jobs’. You see, the more difficult it is to explain what you do to a person, the more difficult it will be to explain it to a Robot or an Artificial Intelligence that might replace us. The biggest advantage any of us can have in the future will become to have a gig, career, or job which is difficult to explain.

So here’s the next question it presents: How do we increase the complexity of what we do to make ourselves unexplainable? My answer is simple – make sure what you do involves the most complex thing the universe has ever created – humans. The more interactions with people and projects our gigs involve, the more complex it becomes. Breadth of interaction is the insurance policy of the future.

And if your gig is streamlined and simple, it might just be time to start adding some complexity and variety.

The Technology Wildfire

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Fire – one of the first technologies we mastered around 230,000 years ago – isn’t much different from our modern day torch light, the smart phone. They both became vital work tools. We hunt with them, they give us access to new types of food, they provide signals and direction, and they facilitate all manner of night time activity which was previously impossible.

It isn’t a stretch to imagine our ancestors walked around with a lit torch in their hands for most of their waking hours. There seems to be an eerie similarity with fire and our lithium ion-powered, handheld digital torches. They both have life-changing power and utility, but unless we learn quickly of their dangers, I fear we’re going to get burnt.

The problem, as I see it, is that we are allowing the technology to control us, instead of us being in charge. We haven’t learned when to put it down, or out, and to let it serve us. It seems at this point we are serving it – and it is the technology companies who power the fire. I was speaking at a conference just last week when a question from the audience was, “Do you think there will be a new technology which will help us put down the technology and get on with a little bit of humanity?’ And this was my answer:

‘We already have that technology – it’s called self-discipline. We can choose to switch off and ‘go dark’ and if it is that our boss, industry or family expects us to be connected at all times, then it might just be a matter of communicating when we won’t be available. Sure, there might be an emergency – but we all know there probably won’t be. Besides we still catch those long flights when emergencies could happen… It’s really just a choice.’

But in all honesty, I do think we need more regulation around digital technology and its use. At the moment technology is spreading like a wildfire which we do not have under control, and the few organizations with the power to bring it under control (our Governments and the big tech companies) are happy to let it burn – even thought it might hollow out important parts of our homes and maybe our civilisations.

Humans have sadly proven again and again that we’ll misuse technology unless guardrails are put in place to protect us, by those who know and care enough about the dangers. It’s easy to forget that workplace health and safety didn’t exist for most of the industrial revolution. We forget that road rules and safety features on cars didn’t just magically appear and that air travel was reserved for crazy risk takers early last century.

We may even be able to convince ourselves that the examples above are vastly different – that this time the technology is just information and can’t possibly harm people the way cars and dangerous machines can. I like to think of it this way: everything physical is informational first. We must first conceive, design and communicate all physical things informationally we make before they come into being. We must also remember that anything technology companies do, happens at scale. They don’t just effect a cohort of buyers or an isolated market.

But it’s not just the technology itself – the size and power of these firms is worth pondering. Consider the fact that the top 5 tech companies (Alphabet / Amazon / Apple / Facebook / Microsoft) now have a collective market capitalisation of $3.7 trillion. That’s more than $1,000 for every person single connected to the internet. It’s also more than 15% of the entire US stock market value which tracks over 3,000 corporations. Every now and again capitalism is put at risk by winner takes all technology. This is why Standard Oil and AT&T were split up into a bunch of smaller firms.

It’s time to tame big tech and regulate – they need to be responsible for anything bad that happens as a result of their products. And if you think regulation is bad for the economy – just remember that next time you board a plane, strap on your seatbelt or have more than one choice of product at a shelf.