The Dark Side of Disruption

Disruption is a good thing. In the long run, creative destruction makes the world better for consumers and businesses alike, removing the inefficient or the slow in favour of businesses that serve customers best.

But in the short run, there is a downside to disruption. Companies go bust, investors lose money, and people lose their jobs. It’s like free trade – good for everyone in the long term, but in the short term there can be real pain.

Many people picked a career and expected that to last until they retired. They expected to go to school and then not have to learn anymore. In other words, they expected things to stay pretty much the same.

But if there’s one thing the world isn’t going to do, it’s stay the same. 

Let us be blunt: Most people won’t be able to keep up, or will choose not to. Life is too busy already, with kids and marriages and worries. Keeping up with the billions of things happening just in your own industry can be exhausting, day after day. The pressure is unrelenting.

But will not keeping up even be an option? Thanks to robots and algorithms, it’s increasingly possible to run a sophisticated business with just a few employees, with everything else being outsourced or automated (and increasingly automated). Blue-collar jobs have been hit already, and white-collar jobs will be hit next as software replaces humans making decisions. Software is not just eating the world, it’s eating jobs too.

But if you’re not an entrepreneur, or at least a self-starter, what role for you is there in the new economy? If you lose your job to a robot, will you have the skills or mindset to find a new one? With change accelerating, will robots and algorithms be the only ones that can keep up?

This is bad news. Disruption means dislocation, and if people can’t or won’t adapt fast enough, we’ll be left with a lot of frustrated, angry and scared people.

People living without hope are ripe for radicalisation and easy prey for demagogues pitching simplistic solutions. Like
 building a giant wall to keep out job-stealing immigrants. Much like the industrial revolution led to Marxism, and like the Great Depression led to the rise of fascism, today’s change will lead to its own brand of reactionary ugliness (Trumpism?).

So how do we go forward from here? A large, disenfranchised, oppressed majority ruled by elites? Or even a Butlerian Jihad of sorts, where we agree on a pace of change slow enough that humans can keep up?

As our economy and society transform, let’s not forget the human cost of change, and bring everyone along into the new world.

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