ricans 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
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