by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
We are bombarded by predictions of the impact of technological innovation on the workers of today and tomorrow. We should all take a deep breath, gather all of the information and facts, and process our own conclusions. Many of these predictions have been re-branded and recycled from past predictions, and have yet to materialize to the degree promised. Those rushing to position themselves at the front of these waves, developing long-term strategies to take advantage of the chaos of change, often find they have wasted a lot of their own, and other people’s, time and resources while unwittingly serving those who had a vested interest in promoting predictions.
According to a recent CBS 60 Minutes piece entitled “Brain Hacking,” “This is Silicon Valley’s strategy to expand sales and brand loyalty. They are busy designing products to grab and hold our attention, similar to strategies used in casino gaming. They design coding for software applications that impact neurological behavior, with regularly scheduled rewards to want you want more. You cannot put down your phone without a cortisol “fight or flight” reaction that makes you want to peek at your phone for relief.” Imagine their predictions for the future. Do you think their predictions might be a little skewed toward the products they have planned for us?
Evolutionary forces (e.g. the movement from an agrarian society to an industrial society) that tend to materialize to the benefit the many who adapt over the few that did not, or could not, are legitimate. This type of evolution is characterized by its slow, steady manifestation, not by starts, stops and completely opposite turns as seen in the many predictions of today.
Many money-driven trends of today are more meant to benefit the few who can afford to adapt or who invest in the “wave” and make a return, over the many who cannot. These movements come and go, leaving the “overly optimistic but not well connected” devotees discredited and demoralized as these waves disappear or continue to morph into the next (what used to be called) “fad.”
Wealth and credit is so concentrated in the hands of a few today. They, and the few who have the resources to benefit from following their agendas, are always looking for new ways to drive movements toward their goals to amass more wealth. When these interests move on as they reach the rewards they seek, or change direction when it looks like investor or consumer interest is running out, they tend to leave behind a disrupted society and economy.
A true “futurist” has no vested interest in his or her predictions. Their predictions are based not on popular themes, but on converging trends – trends that might cancel other themes and trends, might preempt fads from gaining illegitimate strength and might change conclusions of where this all leads.
Modern media outlets, concentrated in dense urban areas, have cut back on reporters and the more costly investigative journalism. They tend to exercise “group think,” and race to be the first to report on their new discovery that originated as a press release from some paid organization. They often add hype and flamboyance to entice a reader to read or listen to the story. It is easy for a well-networked, well-financed organization to fund their own “trend”…or at least create the illusion of one. A good example of this technique is investors who “short” a commodity and, more insidiously, a start-up venture and then “leak news” to naïve or participating network outlets to move the markets in a direction to their benefit, leaving the company’s share value and shareholder wealth destroyed.
There are many examples of how popular media has been wrong in their coverage and wrong in their predictions that find themselves in circulation. Anyone basing a long-term policy or strategy, which will have a lasting legacy and impact the many, on today’s predictions should do so only after deep, sound analysis and re-analysis. Anyone can make a prediction, but it is those who plan for others around a prediction that have to live with the repercussions and hold accountability.
I have listed 23 of these predictions that failed to develop, failed to develop to the level predicted or may not materialize at all that illustrate my point:
Past Predictions:
1. “Manufacturing jobs are going offshore and never coming back” – It started with the steel and electronic industries in the 1970’s. It accelerated with the “Walmart Effect” in the 1980’s, then others, when it began to force unbearable price cuts on their suppliers year after year (most not passed on to the consumer), telling them if they could not produce the product in the United States at that price, they might want to move their operations to China, Mexico or India. Congress created incentives to make the move easier. While U.S.-Based manufacturers saw an opportunity to appease Walmart and Wall St. and moved their operations West, South and East, German, Austrian, Swiss, French, Korean and Japanese manufacturers saw the opportunity to move some of their manufacturing operations here and take advantage of the already trained and skilled manufacturing workers, who work cheaper than their country’s workforce and were comparable in their skills. Nonetheless, myth dispelled. This turned out not to be a prediction, but more an explanation of what some corporations (supported by lobbyists and legislators) wanted to see happen. The negative repercussions to come were grossly understated. Citizen’s concerns have been steadily rising with calls to reverse this manufactured trend, saying that if Congress would reverse the incentives they put in place for corporations wanting to offshore jobs, more manufacturing jobs would come back and stay here. Perhaps if Congress provided as aggressive incentives to small and medium manufacturers who want to remain here and expand, manufacturing job growth would increase substantially. But the countervailing force coming from those multi-national corporations who benefited from the shift they engineered, and who are defending it, will be tough to reverse. Even until it is, the latter part of this prediction is already debunked as a driven movement not an evolutionary trend.
“Educators and workforce developers should focus on the “now” with an eye on the future, not chase the predicted future like the running of the bulls. Those who are bold enough to run out front with the pace-setting bulls at Pamplona sometimes get trampled if the bulls unpredictably change course. The bulls don’t mind as they move to where the momentum they generate is directed. Lemmings, on the other hand, all end up going over the cliff.”
2. “Online training will replace traditional teachers” – It started in the 1980’s, coinciding with the excitement around the first desktop IBM PCs and Macs, when the story then was that classroom training would be replaced by new computer-based training. People were excited about all of the promise of the PC – even though at the time there were very few software applications developed. This prediction didn’t materialize as advertised when the cost to author a computer-based training program was realized, the cost to maintain and update the CBT program understood, the cost of the hardware to support a CBT system was discovered and the rejection of this platform as a training media by most older incumbent workers was encountered. Today, while online training has a role for delivering some types of content in some venues and to some learners, the impact has been far less sweeping then all of the hype would have suggested. Again, this prediction was more an explanation of what the industry wanted and less of a natural evolution. Televised, interactive training, distance learning and facilitated online training are efforts finding a sustainable audience, but a trend has not yet emerged, just wonderful tools to add to the workforce development toolbox.
3. “Globalization will create millions of good-paying service-sector jobs in developed countries to replace the good-paying jobs lost” – This is measured by how you were affected. If you were fortunate in the middle 1990’s – 2000 to have graduated with a college degree in a demand field (e.g. nursing, programming, IT, finance) you might have been given a signing bonus to start a high wage job and/or had your college paid. Today, those jobs are few and many of those job’s wages have retreated, without signing bonuses or tuition. A lucky job holder might have already been replaced by an H2B visa holder and had to train their replacement, or saw their job off-shored. We have had around 20 years of stepped-up globalism. The good-paying manufacturing jobs were outsourced. As good paying jobs disappeared, any lower end service jobs (e.g. hospitality, healthcare, retail) saw their wages reduced as consumption power dropped. This remains an unfulfilled promise that seemed to make domestic workers less fearful of outsourcing and give the movement of jobs overseas time. Not an accurate prediction of what was trending, but more what a group of special interests promulgated to ease their progress.
4. “In a global economy, market concentration (monopolies and ologopies) are needed to compete, but won’t have any negative impact here” – Really? Anyone that has gone shopping for food lately, have looked closely at their bank statement, bought health insurance, gone to the hospital, bought eyeglasses, traveled, scrutinized their cable, electric and wireless bills might have their doubts. The term “too big to fail” played a role in the Crash of 2008. Before globalization, there was a fear of vertical and horizontal monopolization – so much so that it was policed and litigated before it became a threat to competition and the overall economy. Today, market concentration is held by about 5 major insurance companies, 6 major media companies (owning all television, radio and newspapers), 4 major phone companies, 4 grocery chains, 2 office supplies companies, 3 car rental companies, 6 airlines, and on and on. We are all experiencing this “trend” as more of an attempt to justify foreseen collateral damage from industry consolidation.
5. “Cutting taxes on the wealthy will create jobs” – This is a Neoclassical economist’s myth, and there is no evidence that I can find that this is true. In fact, if you take just the last 16 years, taxes were cut under President George W. Bush and continued, for the most part, under President Barack Obama. There is no evidence that cutting taxes created any more jobs than the ones needed to replace the lost jobs. When President Bill Clinton, president from 1992 – 2000, didn’t cut taxes and actually raised some, 22.7 million jobs were created. President George W. Bush, from 2000-2008, cut taxes for the wealthy and only 1.08 million of the 3.331 million jobs promised were created. So why is this even a point of discussion? An article in IndustryWeek by Michael Collins entitled, “Why Tax Reduction Will Not Create Jobs” addresses the pros and cons very thoroughly.
6. “Long-term trade deficits do not have a negative impact on an economy” – Except for 4 years (1998 – 2001) of the last 40 years, the U.S had a trade deficit with the world. This means that this country bought more products and services that the world produced then it produced and sold. Wealth generation of blue and no color workers declined as the world’s increased. There is no denying the negative impact on the U.S. workforce, families, communities and society. Some benefited, many were crushed. We do not see countries that we run trade deficits with up in arms, demanding their governments get rid of their trade surpluses. Most of those countries can also afford to pay for their citizen’s healthcare and education, and citizens maintain a quality of life and lifestyle to envy.
7. “Google Glass will replace the laptop computer” – the first time the google glass camera was used to secretly film a man getting dressed in a golf-course locker room and was posted on the internet, it’s future became questionable. People wearing them into bars had them knocked off their heads. Today, there are limited proper applications for google glasses, but nothing that the hype surrounding it predicted.
8. “You would be stupid not to buy a house now (Fall 2007). The price will only go up!” – Prior to the Crash of 2008, which was not caused by the housing industry alone but by Wall Street’s involvement in it – packaging risky mortgage loans with good loans and calling them all AAA rated securities, then selling these securities to pension funds, 401ks and other investors not paying adequate attention – the media, business shows, and even friends and neighbors (that wanted someone else to validate their decision to buy a house in 2007 by getting someone else into the market) echoed the same sentiment. We all know how that turned out and many people really have yet to recover.
9. “The E-Book will replace traditional books and magazines” – Straining to read from a E-reader or tablet, after the normal eyestrain of a day a work, lost its appeal early on. While convenient to have so many books in an electronic format, there is still nothing like the smell of print and the feel of a turning page. If they could find an eco-friendly alternative to cutting trees to make paper, books will be here to stay.
10. “Newspapers will go away; they are not necessary with all the news sources on the internet’ – Consumers were driven away from newspapers as media companies consolidated and cut the “news” out of the newspapers to cut costs. At the same time, informative newspapers were kept for a few such as the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Investors Daily, The New York Times and Washington Post. Could some people need news and the rest not? Finding news on the internet through computer or phone is time consuming and reading it in that format difficult. Newspapers may not have run their course yet.
The new, future bending predictions show the same pattern. Each time one of these announcements is made, there seems to be a corresponding rise in share price for the stocks of those companies promoting the prediction. For some of these “trends,” it is more about increasing share price than making the world better like they claim. After all, issuing a prediction that “this will be better for mankind” is more palatable to the consumer than “I want to make more money.”
According to a recent CBS 60 Minutes piece entitled “Brain Hacking”, efforts are being made to manipulate brains to develop addictive human behavior, “hooked” on their products. This is Silicon Valley’s strategy to expand sales and brand loyalty. They are busy designing products to grab and hold our attention, similar to strategies used in casino gaming. They design coding for software applications that impact neurological behavior, with regularly scheduled rewards to want you want more. You cannot put down your phone without a cortisol “fight or flight” reaction that makes you want to peek at your phone for relief. Imagine their predictions for the future. Do you think their predictions might be a little skewed toward the products they have planned for us?
You might say, “what about the non-profit organizations that promote these ideas?” Follow the money. To make a prediction seem credible, it needs “experts” from the growing “think tank” industry – created to fabricate credibility (e.g. Heritage Foundation, Club For Growth, Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Center for American Progress) and who are paid to write reports and give speeches in support of (or against) a government policy, new product, change in law, etc. to put the prediction in motion. These “experts” hit the evening and Sunday news circuit. Soon everyone is repeating it because it seems so pervasive. These non-profits are funded by profit-oriented companies or wealthy individuals. And with the decline of investigative journalism, since they too benefit from the advertising from these organizations, it became harder and harder to recognize fact from fiction.
There are people so convinced by these pronouncements and who hopped on board, driven by their conviction that these predictions are valid. They hope to benefit from the manufactured trend or have the desire to be on what they believe will be a “winning team.”
Some of the more recent predictions to follow with interest, but view with clear eyes, are:
Current Predictions:
11. “Cash will be replaced by the proximity chip credit card” – that didn’t last long. The first time opportunists with chip scanning technology (bought on Ebay) were able to stand next to people in the subway, read their card information, clone a credit card for themselves and go shopping, the technology’s support began to unravel. Too much emphasis was placed on the ease of use and apparently little on the innovation’s security and privacy of personal information. And, as more and more frauds and scams are inflicted on consumers, it might drive the trend in the opposite direction. Cash is still seen by many as safe, simple, predictable and less attached to technology.
12. “Biometrics will replace passwords” – It was recently discovered that the fingerprint scanner in mobile phones is primitive in its sophistication and only reads part of a fingerprint to establish its master, which is stored on the phone. More sophisticated applications can interpret the partial print and easily unlock the phone. While biometrics are in use in some firms that make it a requirement of employment, the invasion into personal privacy, combined with the lack of control of this private information, keeps resistance to this technology high. Knowing that a profit-based company could sell this information to other businesses and the government, or knowing that once this information is obtained in a hack that fingerprints, retina scans and DNA are out in the world, for now the risks far outweigh the benefits.
13. “Computers in your car are a good thing” – this seems like a good thing, until one looks at the “cons” and there are numerous significant ones. Driver distraction from advertising (we all know it is coming), the fact that the system is a computer and therefore easy to hack, its potential use for surveillance to gather data and personal information on the drivers and passengers, the possibility of the system’s fallibility or manipulation causing accidents are just a few. And when consumers add collection of this data on their daily commutes and vacation travel to all of the other data collected on them, will that spawn a movement against all personal data collection and storage?
14. “Driverless cars will become a significant portion of the traffic” – In addition to the general creepiness of riding in a car with no driver, there are a number of legal matters alone that have yet to be thought through. Who is legally responsible if the driverless car causes an accident? Will insurance cover driverless cars? How much will the insurance cost? Then the standard ones, such as, can these cars be hacked? Are the on-board computers gathering personal information on the driver and passengers? How will that information be stored and used? Has anyone thought about the wireless bandwidth required for such an enterprise on top of the bandwidth needed for all other phone, computer, streaming video and games usage? If satellite communication is interrupted, cars, phones and computers may all be interrupted or shut down. And if this isn’t enough, the first time a driverless vehicle is “weaponized,” perhaps into a driverless car-bomb, the government may ground all driverless cars like all airline traffic after 9-11. The “v2v” (“vehicle-to-vehicle) communication proposed that allows cars to communicate to each other – to avoid crashing into each other – will require incredibly more bandwidth and wireless frequencies, and are as vulnerable to hacking for privacy intrusion or for malicious acts such as causing individual car, or entire system, failure.
15. “Driverless semi-trucks will dominate the highway” – In addition to the same concerns about driverless cars, how comfortable would you be driving down the highway with a driverless semi behind or beside you? I am already uncomfortable enough when I see a truck driver texting or dozing off.
16. “Drones will deliver your pizza and packages” – drones have already been weaponized on a large scale in a war setting, but someone even mounted an automatic pistol on a personal drone and posted a YouTube video of it shooting. Think of the first instance of a bomb delivered to a residence dressed as a pizza or a package delivery. Then there are the personal privacy concerns from peeping voyeurs and the threats they pose to airplanes taking off and landing at airports. And when flying cars enter the picture…
17. “The Internet of Things will control all aspects of life” – success of this trend will depend on several things – many of them mentioned. The shear practicality of it is one. Will consumers see enough benefit in a refrigerator that tells the owner when they are out of groceries? Investors are counting on the fact that the consumer data, that can be collected and sold, will make them huge returns. Privacy and security issues are a definite consideration. Recent Silicon Valley investors put $120 million into a start-up producing a new “juicer” – one that also collects user information that apparently has a lot of sales potential. A juicer that learns and reports user habits?
18. “Bitcoin will replace sovereign currencies“– every time a global event threatens the value of a sovereign currency the value of bitcoin rises, but then those threats subside. Having a currency that has the same uncontrolled volatility as stocks seems risky. When a hacker takes off with electronic currency the value can drop significantly, and if it was your bitcoins that were taken it is even worse. Recent ransomware proliferators of the WannaCry virus demanded payment in bitcoins, which does not add to it legitimacy. It is true that many sovereign nations have been wreckless in their protection of their currency’s value, replacing it with a more risky alternative seems not to be the solution.
19 “The “Cloud” will house all the world’s software applications and data” – one of the major concerns is security and privacy for both consumers and businesses. For a business, having all personal information, intellectual property and trade secrets in one location makes a sweet target for industrial espionage. What happens when a company that houses your data files bankruptcy or is acquired (as they usually are)? What happens to the rights associated with the personal and proprietary data? Once this data is taken, a business or a personal life can be permanently impacted or destroyed. Even though software manufacturers have collectively decided to slowly “nudge” consumers toward the point of no choice, it is yet to be seen if consumers will accept the change.
20. “3D printing will radically alter manufacturing” – 3D printing is exciting technology, but I do not see it having a significant, massive role in the near future. For now, it is more limited to modeling and R & D, or in educational and biomedical engineering labs. But it has promise that may present itself in time.
21. “Robots will replace workers” – This is a popular one today. It is one topic that is sexy to the media and scary enough to warrant endless repeating. Robots will replace some technical jobs, no doubt. But robotics are expensive to purchase and to maintain. The long-run benefits have to far exceed the costs if a company is going to make the investment. Plus, robotic technology is rapidly advancing – making an investment decision now when it might be obsolete next year will always be a concern. The cost of each upgrade, re-configuring each workstation, upgrading the required hardware, and the down-time to do so has been experienced too many times already. Small and medium-size operations will be hesitant, and in many cases unable, to invest in robotics. And large corporations will do what they want to do anyway, so maybe we should focus on the needs of the small and medium-size companies, who are usually the most neglected, instead of chasing corporations who may be gone (with their robotics and jobs) tomorrow anyway.
22. “Blockchain will transform the world” – while blockchain, in theory, sounds interesting, one cannot overlook the amount of data that enterprises would have to expose to the world to make it work as designed. In an April, 2017 article in CFO Magazine by Jeanne Boillet entitled, “Blockchain: Should CFOs Believe the Hype?” the author described the theory, benefits and barriers to mass adoption. Without consideration of how the world we live in makes global systems that are based on trust implausible, these ideas seem more an engineered fantasy or utopia.
23. “By 2025, 14.4 million workers will put on smartglasses to enhance their productivity” – We have heard this one before (“Google Glass”). According to the April 11, 2017 New Equipment Digest article “Wave of Industrial Wearables (Part 2)” this is the latest. We will have to see how workers embrace them and the physical effects of their use 8 hours a day.
In a recent article in Material Handling and Logistics entitled, “Workforce Issues Still Top Material Handling, Logistics Sector Concern”, the author cites in the results of a survey on concerns over “Disruptive Technologies”:
“The top technologies respondents say can be a source of either disruption or competitive advantage are:
–Robotics and automation (61%)
–Predictive analytics (57%)
–The Internet-of-Things (IoT) (55%)
–Driverless vehicles & drones (54%)
–Sensors and automatic identification (53%)
–Inventory & Network Optimization Tools—50%”
One man’s (or many people’s) disruption is another man’s competitive advantage. Designing a workforce development strategy around any prediction for any or all of those mentioned above could be unproductive at the least, and risky and futile at the worst. There will always be someone coming along to disrupt the disruptors.
From a government policy perspective, if these predictions all came true and became ubiquitous, what is to be done with all the displaced workers? Is the government ready to tax corporations at a much higher rate in order to provide financial assistance and support to displaced workers and families? We can already see the affects of the Crash of 2008 – the massive dislocation of workers and its affect on the worker, the worker’s family, the community, the society. Is the U.S. ready to institutionalize this?
If the “wealth gap” continues to increase, which follows with a corresponding decrease in consumer consumption, many of these predictions may not materialize as investors withdraw support. There is the phenomenon of “technology overload.” Signs have already surfaced that consumers are not as quick to innovate on all things on a yearly basis, such as software updates that require updating other software and hardware. Many small and mid-size firms stalled out at Windows 7 and 8 operating systems after encountering significant costs, business interruption and frustration with each upgrade.
And for all internet-based predictions, the debate on net neutrality is still playing out. The outcome of this debate will have a profound impact on the cost, quality and affordability of all of the things and activities associated with the internet and whether a consumer will embrace them or despise them.
My point is that advancement in technology is a good thing. It is what drives innovation and spawns even newer ideas. But we should learn to process predictions like we would the national nightly news and the local weather forecast – both which have a history of being wrong when we needed them and right when we quit believing in them. It is good to share a vision of the future, but not so good to bet the future on the paid parade designed to draw support. Wall Street has the most control of what the fabricated future will look like and whether a prediction will reach maturity. They can turn even their own predictions in another direction, before everyone is on board, if there doesn’t seem to be the money it.
The distraction that some of the more ambitious and overzealous “early adopters” cause to workforce development policies and strategies lingers when they turn out to be embarrassingly wrong. Future workers trained on skills for jobs that never materialize, and the companies who never found the workers with the core skills they needed because schools were training on skills of the flawed vision of the “future,” lose years worth of time, opportunity and wealth The collective disruption by an economy that jumps and sputters – each time alienating a working class sector, community or region, cannot be tamed by a prediction, but it can be moderated by reason.
Educators and workforce developers should focus on the “now” with an eye on the future, not chase the predicted future like the running of the bulls. Those who are bold enough to run out front with the pace-setting bulls at Pamplona sometimes get trampled if the bulls unpredictably change course. The bulls don’t mind as they move to where the momentum they generate is directed. Lemmings, on the other hand, all end up going over the cliff.
Put metaphorically another way, do workforce developers want to be sheep or sheep dogs? Sheep follow the herd and don’t think well for themselves. In 2005, while stopping for lunch, distraught sheep herders in Turkey watched one sheep go off a cliff, which was followed by the remaining 1500 sheep. Around 450 dead sheep lay as a cushion for the surviving sheep. A good sheep dog would have looked out for the sheep, kept them out of danger by steering them safely on the right path and would have put the flock’s interests above their own.
It pays to be discerning; paying attention to technological predictions but acting on them only when predictions become a bona fide trend. When it is thought out carefully and predictions are “averaged” to hedge bets, it is then that one can position a sustainable strategy ahead of the curve or closely behind the curve. No community, region or country does well with multi-year workforce development policies when workers are produced that employers do not want and employers are left waiting for workers that never arrive. These days, no one can afford to be wrong too often.
Proactive Technologies, Inc. has worked with many workforce development agencies and planners on projects to address the workforce needs of today, with that eye on the future. If all that can be done is to accurately train workers for today’s employers and today’s jobs, that is a great accomplishment. Gradual adjustment to “up-skill” employed and new workers for substantiated new and emerging job skills is easier when built on a strong foundation already in place. Lurching from prediction to prediction – to the detriment of those who need accuracy the most – wastes all stakeholder’s time and resources.
Proactive Technologies, Inc.®; PROTECH; Human Resource Management for Tomorrow...Today!® and logo;