It’s now possible to sell
a new product to hundreds of millions of people without needing many, if any,
workers to produce or distribute it.
At its
prime in 1988, Kodak, the iconic American photography company, had 145,000 employees. In 2012, Kodak filed
for bankruptcy.
The
same year Kodak went under, Instagram, the world’s newest photo company, had 13 employees serving 30 million customers.
The
ratio of producers to customers continues to plummet. When Facebook purchased
“WhatsApp” (the messaging app) for $19 billion last year, WhatsApp had 55 employees serving 450 million customers.
A friend, operating from his home in Tucson, recently invented a
machine that can find particles of certain elements in the air.
He’s already sold hundreds of these machines over the Internet
to customers all over the world. He’s manufacturing them in his garage with a
3D printer.
So far, his entire business depends on just one person –
himself.
New technologies aren’t just labor-replacing. They’re also
knowledge-replacing.
The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition,
artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition
algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human
actions, and even learning from one another.
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