ough a pneumatic tube—pfft—just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils…
The distribution of content and information (and physical goods) has come a long way. Fax machines soon emerged. Then the internet came along and blew everything up.
You could argue Hebbia fits better in this bucket—and Hebbia certainly improves access to information, in addition to organization. But another interesting vector is broadening access by crowding in more content and information in the first place. There’s a lot of latent knowledge out there, and we’re now seeing startups work to unlock it. Reforge is building an “expert economy” to learn from world-class functional leaders in categories like growth marketing and product management. Office Hours lets you book time with an expert to tap their specialized knowledge. And Tegus offers a repository of company intelligence—thousands and thousands of transcripts with experts.
AI applies here too: in the old days, you might need to learn a new language through Duolingo or even a live human tutor; now you can turn to Speak and get instant feedback from an AI tutor.
Access is being approved—both in how we tap into pre-existing information, and how we expand the pool of information that’s out there.
Why does any of this matter? Technologies of the moment have far-reaching impacts on how people live and work. One example—
In 1950, 342,000 Americans worked as telephone operators for the Bell Telephone network—and another 1,000,000 worked for private phone operator companies. The US population at the time was ~150 million, meaning about 1 in 100 Americans (and 1 in 60 members of the labor force) worked as a phone operator. That’s a roughly equivalent portion to the share of the modern workforce employed by Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer.
But by 1984, the telephone was shifting to automated systems, and national employment was down to 40,000. By 2020, fewer than 2,000 Americans were employed as telephone operators (and I’m sure we’re all wondering why we still need 2,000 phone operators).
The transition from analog to digital transformed labor markets. We’ll see a similar shift with new technologies reinventing how people work. The Institute for the Future predicts that 85% of the jobs that today’s students will have in 2030 don’t yet exist. That seems far-fetched, until you consider jobs that have emerged in the past decade or so: drone operator, social media manager, app developer, cloud computing engineer.
The analog technologies above were groundbreaking at the time, but were rendered moot by the onset of the digital age. We’re now progressively moving through digital eras: mobile, cloud, AI. The same frameworks from the innovations of the 20th century can be applied to the innovations of the 21st. The arc of technology bends to more production, better organization, improved access. The arc has bent that way for hundreds of years, and it will continue to bend that way—likely even more rapidly and more dramatically as the pace of change accelerates.
Sources & Additional Reading
Check out the Museum of the City of New York—it’s well worth a visit
Read about Hebbia and George Sivulka in The Information
Thanks for reading! Subscribe here to receive Digital Native in your inbox each week: