The Impact of Accelerating Rates of Technological Change: Our Interview with Kartik Gada
We had a great conversation with Kartik Gada on the accelerating rate of change. His unique focus is on the impact of technology changes on the economy. Katik maintains a YouTube Channel. His primary book, 'Third Millennium Economics', has been read by 450,000 people. Here are links to the episode.
Here are a few of the highlights for me:
The portion of our economy that is tech-heavy is 4%. He has a method to calculate this, and it is relatively small now. However, it has been doubling at a fast rate. As the 4% doubles and doubles again, many industries will be disrupted.
Large sectors of the economy that have been slow to adopt technology (education, medical, government) aren’t immune, but change may come suddenly as pressure builds. He has an interesting model for thinking about this. He believes technology will continue to impact the economy. In some sectors, it will be a steady adoption. For other industries, the changes will happen around the edges where savvy consumers benefit. But, at some point when the technology is 10X (or some other big number) better, the traditional industry may experience the change all at once (and that may not be pleasant!) In his view, the forces of technological progress are stronger than those opposing them.
We aren't thinking about or teaching people to be more entrepreneurial. As technology continues to impact the economy, there will be more opportunities to be more entrepreneurial, more ways to make a living, and the need to be less binary about having or not having a particular job. Our education system isn’t particularly good at teaching people to be more entrepreneurial. This last comment reminded me of Temple Grandin’s (see this post) point that our education system wasn’t great at encouraging visual thinkers.
The split between people who embrace and don’t like technological change is 50/50. If you are a leader, half your team won’t like technological change. You need to help with that.
Leaders need to fight rigidity. As companies grow, they become rigid. This makes it harder to embrace new technology.
Technology creates and helps control complexity. As technology creates more complexity, it is important to use this technology to understand the world.
I hope you enjoy this podcast episode.