Digital Paradigm

It is more than just a divide, it is a whole new world.

This falls into the thoughts and opinion section of my website. We are all free to have thoughts and opinions of our own and I hope my readers can understand this and take this post as just that. A way to look at a subject thought my eyes and then be able to have their own thoughts on the subject.

Technology is a tricky subject. Even the sentence "Technology is a tricky subject." is misleading. Most people view technology as a subject , but it is not, technology is a catalyst of change or amplification. It is actually not the subject at all, but layer on top of any or all subjects. In my opinion the best way to teach technology is to pick any subject or objective and then add technology to it. You see this with the SAMR method and most project base learning in the educational world.

So, what is different now? Why the title of this post? Before I can answer that I must state that our history is defined by technological change. We group time periods of history by the technological advancement that put us there like; Bronze age, Iron Age, Digital age, etc... I think we are in one of those shifts right now. Not just a small shift but a fundamental shift. It could be as profound as when we started to mark on cave walls and gave birth to history as we know it. Why? Because what is different now is that technology went from jet engine fast to warp drive fast.

Given the effects of the pandemic we are seeing change that normally would have taken 10 years (an example I hear often) taking months or barely a year. Change was already happening pretty fast but the spark of having to go virtual started something else completely. Some are calling it the Pandora's box of work. I see it more like a fast warp into a completely new world. Much like a time machine and we just got a ticket to go 20-30 years into the future.

What is strange about this new world is that you are starting to see more consolidation. Technology tends to do this, just look at your smart phone. In this case you are seeing the very fabric of how we run our lives change completely. How we move money, how we get goods or services, how we learn, everything is and will be different. Even what is an asset could be fundamentally changed.

Think about that smartphone again, what do you do now with that smartphone that you once payed someone else to do? Now take that thought and apply it to everything else. What if you did not need a bank, or have to go to a store again, or have to drive to work, or just about anything else where you had to get in a car and go somewhere?

To call this the 4th industrial revolution is weak. There is very little industry about it. You are cutting out the middle man with technology. Business will forever be changed. I think this is why you are seeing the reduction of the middle class. The people at the top are figuring out that if they can leverage technology then they can make a lot of money not paying the person in the middle. The problem is that the people at the top are not normally the creators of products but creators of systems. I believe this will become cheap as well. The real power going forward will be the new creator class. The concept and economics of scale is at the heart of this. With new technology you can scale just about anything to anyone on the face of this world and beyond. It will be the humanities that will be at the heart of this new world.

We have done a lot of system building to exchange goods and services. Those systems are becoming obsolete. We are going beyond mere survival but up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I just hope we do not forget our humanity in the process of transitioning to this new world.