When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance.
There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.
Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.
Some people think it's a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits. There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It's possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don't share in that gain.
The kind of job where you have to hustle and hustle and where you're not sure whether you will have enough clients next month, where you have less job security, is becoming much more common.
Technology has made it easier for different firms to coordinate their activities with one another, and they don't have to be part of one company. They can get the benefits of scale without the inertia of scale.
We're rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.
Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.
