There was a lot of interesting things that came out of President Obama’s farewell address this week. One of the most interesting is when he talked about the shape of the changing economy and how it is impacting everyone.
When you combine that with this concept that many traditionally Democratic voters voted for Donald Trump because of his speaking to the issue of jobs, jobs leaving, and the need to create more good jobs, it marks an interesting way to think about the impact of changing economy and technology on the fortunes of our country.
What I am getting at is that we are seeing the death throes of the paint by number job.
For a long time, we thought that factory assembly jobs, menial labor, things like that were the places that we saw repetitive labor being a big part of American economy.
But as technology has encroached on every aspect of our lives, we have seen repetitive, paint by number tasks evolve.
It used to be highly skilled to manage the key punch, to word process, and other jobs that are now just the price of admission to even be considered for a job in many places.
What this means as a practical point is that for a long time, the repetitive jobs had begun to shift from manual labor to office labor and that helped maintain and grow a standard of living that felt like it was keeping up with what we had commonly referred to as the American Dream.
Now though, we have seen artificial intelligence and machine learning and computers that have stepped in to take the place of line workers. We see that computers and AI can produce content, do repetitive tasks, and other jobs that maybe were always done by humans before.
To many, this is a traumatic moment.
Why?
Because, change has always been a theoretical thing.
But in reality change is going to touch every industry at some point.
But this death to the paint by number job is actually a good sign.
Because as President Obama said that we need to remove ourselves from our self contained bubbles of “Republican” or “Democrat,” “left” or “right,” “progressive” or “conservative.” We also need to remove ourselves from the worldview that things will never change and that I can just get by by getting by.
Because that isn’t the world that we live in.
As we have more, rapidly expanding globalization, we are going to actually need to do something much more important that just a job.
We are going to need to focus on how we can do the things that only people and individuals can do because certain jobs aren’t going to be taken by computers anytime soon.
These are things like marketing, selling, strategic thinking, critical thinking, connecting with people in a human manner.
Those are still alive.
Those are the kinds of things we need more and more.