One of the most fascinating reads I’ve come across online recently is Breaking Smart. I’ve only reached Chapter 5 of 22 in Season 1, but it’s already given me a whole lot of insights and perspectives not only on its primary premise – “software is eating the world” – but also on the future of work and employment, an area I have been very interested in for a while now. Chapter 3 (Getting Reoriented) for instance, dwells upon how classic generational conflicts of previous eras is playing out as an economy-wide technological disruption now. This chapter also talks of the dilemma that pretty much everyone faces these days, (though I can’t be sure how many have thought about/acknowledged this) should I abandon some of my investments in the industrial social order and join the dynamic new social order, or hold on to the status quo as long as possible?
The related question that has arisen in my head is this – is there really a choice? A script that seemed to be good to go with for all my working life, when I started employment, is on its way to redundancy now. I felt a parallel to this narrative in this post – Hard Choices : Growth versus Profitability, and that led me to wonder if any capital is patient these days. A relative lack of constancy and predictability – reducing shelf life of organisations/products/business models, and constant disruption from unpredictable sources, business and macroeconomic scenarios that do a volte face with zero warning, I can see why capital might not want to wait long. But this also has a direct impact on the work and lives of humans.
As this is happening in the context of us as producers, I think we are aggravating the situation as consumers. We want everything and more right now and are ironically, becoming slaves of convenience, and abundance. This fits a ‘growth’ path very well. We are more than willing to pay the short term price, but do we think about the long term effect? It is probably in the nature of technology to progress at a rate faster than we can process and internalise it, maybe this is a prequel to what the singularity will bring. This is probably great for us as consumers, but are we paying too little attention to the complexity that it will wreak on our larger life canvass? Has the ‘monoculture’ that Kickstarter speaks of going against, too far gone for us to even attempt an alternate track?
Like I mentioned in the beginning, impressed is probably an understatement for how I perceive Breaking Smart, but from 25% of the content, there’s a fear gnawing inside me – is the narrative very clear that there is only one work& life worldview ahead? That scares me.
P.S. An insightful read on Growth & Profitability