Stay on Top of the Curve
What will happen to our jobs in the age of exponential technological development?
This question made me take another look at Marty Neumeier’s book Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age. It was published ten years ago but is timelier than ever. Even the dust cover of the book says: “Help! A robot ate my job!”
Neumeir writes that over time, there’s consistent downward pressure on the cost and value of work. He describes it as the Robot Curve. The value and cost of work decrease as its mechanization increases:
Tasks and even professions go down the curve as technology advances. The best jobs are at the top, and they determine all the other jobs down along the curve.
The lower you are on the curve, the less autonomy you have, the less money you make, and the less adaptable you are when the marketplace demands new skills.
But, while automation puts people out of work, it also opens up new opportunities for innovators at the top of the curve.
How to succeed?
Neumeier presents a strategy to stay relevant in this new world. He calls it Metaskills, five talents that serve us best in the age of nonstop innovation. They are: feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning (read more about them on my blog).
Perhaps the most surprising metaskill is "feeling." After all, it is most often kicked to the curb in business and technology. We prefer computer-like rational thinking to “emotional intelligence” and intuition, even if it stems from deep experience.
However, Neumeier asks, if the ability to make fast, accurate calculations is so valuable, why hasn’t evolution equipped us to think like computers? After all, computer-like processing is not a biological impossibility, as mathematical savants have shown.
So, could becoming more human and defaulting to intuition and feelings be a crucial strategy for staying on top of the Robot Curve?
From AEC Business
A New Digital Twin for an Existing Bridge
The smartBRIDGE Hamburg project devised a digital twin of a 1970s bridge using open BIM technologies. Allplan and Solibri were instrumental in developing the twin that enables the Hamburg Port Authority, HPA, to maintain the critical infrastructure asset predictively.
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The Oracle Industry Lab worked with several leading construction and engineering companies on a groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind experiment to explore what combination of tool, process, and team are best for conducting reality mapping on a construction project site.
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BArch MRIAI, Director at ARCDOX
1 年Thanks for all your great updates Aarni.