via medium – The Industrial Era jobs and institutions decline towards death and the Information Era matures and blooms. The decline of the Industrial Era may have been subtler, and easy to ignore in years past.
The global economy as a whole will also be in precarious place if Information Era companies do not continue to produce accelerating growth. While we’ve nominally been in recovery since 2009, much of the expansion has been enabled by unprecedented levels of debt created by Central Banks around the world. Sky high debt levels across consumers, corporations and countries, are all being buoyed by historically low interest rates. Wealth inequality is rising fast and geopolitical tensions are heating up. We’ve been blessed by very low volatility the last few years, but we also are in many ways dependent on it.
Technology companies continue to become a bigger percentage of the world economy. They have overtaken Oil and Gas companies to become the largest public companies in the world, the private market is bursting with billion dollar unicorn valuations unseen before in history, and many non-technological industries are either dying at its hands or becoming one with it.
Some of this technological future will come from large companies, but by and large these large companies still haven’t figured out how to reliably create disruptive innovation. Their role in the innovation landscape is predominantly as acquirers, where they grow acquired products, applying their capacity for efficiency and scale.
An essential orienting frame for understanding the current state of the world, is that we are at a point of criticality. A liminal space between eras. The old world Industrial order is breaking down, and the new Information world order is in the process of taking over. This transition period is one of opposing forces of exponential creation and exponential destruction.
In the forthcoming era of technological disruption the need for a robust social safety net will be paramount.
worth reading, I’d recommend max. attention 😉