Disruptive innovations

This week we looked at disruptive innovations. These are innovations which have the capacity to fundamentally change how we do things. I recently read this book by Fareed Zakaria. In it, he described the looming societal crisis of automation that governments and individuals all seem to be blissfully unaware of. He uses the argument that we are facing becoming replaced by robots and machines in many sectors as evidence that more value should be placed on a liberal education which is yet to be challenged by automation.

I think automation and disruptive innovations go hand in hand. Take the drone for example. At the moment they are used for various reasons, such as surveillance and for photographers and videographers to get amazing images. However, there is already talk of large companies such as Amazon using them to deliver goods directly to people's homes. Imagine if this became widespread practice? Imagine if it was no longer necessary for there to be delivery trucks, drivers, warehouse operatives? It could disrupt an entire sector. There are approximately 3.5 million people employed as truck drivers in the US that would no longer be needed. However, there would also be positive benefits in terms of the environmental, no more long truck journeys.

This is not an argument that suggests that disruptive innovations are necessarily bad. For example, far more people are employed in IT now than were ever employed as telephone operatives. However, it is clear that, where we are unprepared, new technologies could displace huge numbers of people from employment and even cause entire sectors to collapse. I wonder if a secret plan is being drawn up somewhere to tackle this?!