Technology is still freaking people out. I suppose it's understandable. For centuries, humanity progressed with just incremental little improvements in productivity from year to year... then automation technology and computers show up and everything explodes. Workers are able to produce 10x or 20x or 200x as much in the same time period. Wages were the first to go, immediately divorcing themselves from any relationship to the amount of value the worker produces for the company.
This sounds to me like an outgrowth of that. "Can this little bit of software really be worth THAT much?" When it sparks exponential growth and enables a company to be active in a global marketplace with a handful of employees, yes, it absolutely can be. But with a voluntarily blinded eye turned to the actual value of software, everything looks the same. An app to waste a few hours in entertainment, or a system to automate part of customer service? Which one can make a ton of money?
He may be quite right though. I've lost track of how often I read stories about a startup and then am absolutely gob-smacked at the number of employees they bring on. They start a project that could be easily and competently handled by maybe 15 people, and they hire 1500. What most of those people are doing is anyones guess, probably marketing and design work that should have been done by contracted remote-work freelancers I suppose. They continue ignoring everything and pretending like this is 1975, like offices are something more than a gigantic drain on efficiency with no payoff. And they plunk themselves down in Silicon Valley, paying $28000/mo to rent an efficiency apartment above a garage. The actual WORK, the production of value, seems completely ignored next to the rush of "playing the game."
If there is an invisible hand guiding the market, we will see "companies" as such evaporate eventually. They no longer offer any value. They used to offer almost all the value, by solving the problem of distribution, both of work to workers and product to customers. Thanks to the Internet and software, distribution is a solved problem. It's nearly worthless because anyone can do it. All that efficiency that companies could afford while standing between a worker and an end customer, skimming 90% off of every transaction between them, is going to become their death.
Hooking workers up with people who need the product of their work will be handled by software, putting together teams automatically, managing reputation and portfolios to provide good fits to whoever needs a team of a certain type. Without companies there to take almost all of the value being exchanged, workers will find it only necessary to work occasionally. The massive productivity improvements that have occurred since 1980, like a secretary going from being able to answer 20 letters a day to handling 300 emails before lunch, which were collected exclusively by the company owners and upper management will make it so terribly easy for people to make a decent living without working much. And when people do work, they'll do it from home because there's simply no reason to gather them together in the same building which costs more and lowers their productivity. For work that requires heavy tools and things of that nature, I expect people will open community workshops where people can lease workspace and equipment.
The industries where the service actually HAS to be carried out in person have proven fairly resistant to takeover by small numbers of large corporate concerns. There are always independent plumbers, hairdressers, and restaurants everywhere. Thanks to the Internet, essentially everything escapes from this need for fragile centralization.
This sounds to me like an outgrowth of that. "Can this little bit of software really be worth THAT much?" When it sparks exponential growth and enables a company to be active in a global marketplace with a handful of employees, yes, it absolutely can be. But with a voluntarily blinded eye turned to the actual value of software, everything looks the same. An app to waste a few hours in entertainment, or a system to automate part of customer service? Which one can make a ton of money?
He may be quite right though. I've lost track of how often I read stories about a startup and then am absolutely gob-smacked at the number of employees they bring on. They start a project that could be easily and competently handled by maybe 15 people, and they hire 1500. What most of those people are doing is anyones guess, probably marketing and design work that should have been done by contracted remote-work freelancers I suppose. They continue ignoring everything and pretending like this is 1975, like offices are something more than a gigantic drain on efficiency with no payoff. And they plunk themselves down in Silicon Valley, paying $28000/mo to rent an efficiency apartment above a garage. The actual WORK, the production of value, seems completely ignored next to the rush of "playing the game."
If there is an invisible hand guiding the market, we will see "companies" as such evaporate eventually. They no longer offer any value. They used to offer almost all the value, by solving the problem of distribution, both of work to workers and product to customers. Thanks to the Internet and software, distribution is a solved problem. It's nearly worthless because anyone can do it. All that efficiency that companies could afford while standing between a worker and an end customer, skimming 90% off of every transaction between them, is going to become their death.
Hooking workers up with people who need the product of their work will be handled by software, putting together teams automatically, managing reputation and portfolios to provide good fits to whoever needs a team of a certain type. Without companies there to take almost all of the value being exchanged, workers will find it only necessary to work occasionally. The massive productivity improvements that have occurred since 1980, like a secretary going from being able to answer 20 letters a day to handling 300 emails before lunch, which were collected exclusively by the company owners and upper management will make it so terribly easy for people to make a decent living without working much. And when people do work, they'll do it from home because there's simply no reason to gather them together in the same building which costs more and lowers their productivity. For work that requires heavy tools and things of that nature, I expect people will open community workshops where people can lease workspace and equipment.
The industries where the service actually HAS to be carried out in person have proven fairly resistant to takeover by small numbers of large corporate concerns. There are always independent plumbers, hairdressers, and restaurants everywhere. Thanks to the Internet, essentially everything escapes from this need for fragile centralization.
Just ignore me, I grew up online in the 1990s...