This will be the topic for my talk at DLD New York this coming Thursday. Here is the rough outline. If anyone has data to contribute I would much appreciate it since I am admittedly long on anecdotes and short on statistics.
1. Disappearance of growth. Here I will talk about how GDP is increasingly a bad measure for economic growth as we are moving to a world with lots of positive externalities. For instance, as Khan Academy grows it will reduce the number of traditional textbooks sold. That shows up as negative GDP growth.
2. Disappearance of jobs. This is about the rise of automation and the increasing shift to self service. For example, commerce is moving online and even in stores self service checkout is on the rise. It is impacting jobs up and down the knowledge spectrum, including lawyers and doctors.
3. Disappearance of capital. Companies historically required working capital because they had to pay employees, suppliers, rent etc. before being able to charge for their products. Now they can use some combination of pre-orders, on demand manufacturing or purely digital distribution to either do away with or even reverse the need for capital.
4. Disappearance of companies. Companies were a critical way of muting incentives to achieve coordination. Now that we can share more information we can often do the same or better without having to form a company. This is especially true for systems without direct monetary compensation. A fun example of what’s possible is “Twitch defeats Pokemon.”
5. Disappearance of attention. OK, so you could also call that the “rise of attention as the key scarcity” but that would require me to find a different title … The basic idea though is that both at the individual and the aggregate level attention used to be more focused. As individuals we now have many more “interrupts” and in aggregate it is more costly to get a critical mass of people to focus on an issue.
Please feel free to suggest other relevant disappearances. But since I am only talking for 10 minutes I probably won’t add any to for Thursday. More importantly though, if you happen to have additional anecdotes or better yet data on any of these points, please let me know.
PS I am not sure about live streaming from the event but historically DLD has been very good about putting videos of all talks online.
