Mooshy Series: Article #2, The world is changing much faster than it used to

About the series

This is the second article in the Mooshy Series. I am using this series in order to write out. I plan to showcase this series to a couple of potential leads in the future as a proof that I can produce free-form content on various topics which don’t specifically relate to my immediate domain in copywriting, i.e. tech at large. But, at the same time, I am still going to gravitate back to the tech-related things throughout the series.

About the first article

So, in the first article, I described my strategy, according to which I plan to work as a tech copywriter for some time, and then I plan to migrate into webdev (not simple sites, but webapps) which I am learning a couple of years per day. I’ve specified that it wasn’t a random choice on my part but rather a highly elaborated strategy. I have already migrated to a highly lucrative niche of tech copywriting and I am currently making a good amount of money. It’s good when I am comparising my wages with Moscow Russia. In comparison with US-based salaries, it’s going to be too small. But I plan to continue growing. I plan to write consistently and hone my skills in the domain. Plus, I am doing the training program which will enable me to migrate from copywriting into webdev at a certain point.

The world is changing around me

So, I’ve been doing this strategy for a couple of years now. I am making the money to pay for food, plus I am saving up in order to cover the debts I have and leave Russia.

I have a pretty decent income source ATM, and I plan to make sure that I retain it in the foreseeable future. I am also developing my skills as a web developer.

Currently, I work as an English content writer in tech. I love this job. It helps me connect with super-interesting folks, and I produce valuable content for their brands.

The world is definitely changing around me. I remember that when I was at school (I graduated school in 2003), I didn’t spend much time on the Internet. I was watching TV, reading books and spending time outside. The Internet wasn’t an integral part of my life.

And now the Internet is really an inalienable segment of my life.

I expect that the society will be slowly moving from offline existence to online existence. I don’t know whether Elon Musk will be actively implanting chips in 2030, but in 2020 it feels like you should be online if you want to be doing business.

Also, the situation with the coronavirus has been a big splash in my world. It has been in everybody’s world.

In this article, I want to identify the ways in which the world is changing. Like, what is really happening all around us. I believe that if a person is taking an effort in order to observe how their environment is changing, it significantly improves their chances to prosper. And in the third article of this series I plan to talk about the method we can use in order to prosper in the new world.

Ways in which the world is changing

Here the ways in which the society is transforming. Transforming in what?

#1. Change is now constant

I understand that it must always feel to the people living within a particular epoch and their current events and their concerns and their potential futures are the most important thing in the world. And they are the key to the survival of the world.

There are though periods during which folks aren’t living through that many upheavals. I can imagine that small villages in the first half of the central area scattered around rural America would not be experiencing a lot of upheavals. They would just be existing. People there would go to work, have kids, get educated and move up the career ladders. Then they would give way to new generations.

Isn’t the same thing happening right now?

I don’t know. To me, it feels that there’s a very big rupture between the previous generations and the currently active generations.

The values are eroding.

In the 1950s and several decades after that, you would be able to have a factory job. With which you would feed your family and pay for your car, house and maybe a boat somewhere. People were sustaining themselves with their jobs.

Now is a bit different. It’s hard to imagine factory jobs paying well enough to enable workers to feel comfortable in their life journey.

Is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing?

This thing is most definitely happening. That’s for sure. It’s clear that lots of manufacturing and similar jobs are being sucked out by China and similar labor markets.

And within China itself, we are seeing strong waves of automation. Jobs are being eliminated with folks being replaced by robots.

And it’s not Americans this time around, but Chinese. Since Chinese have much-much lower pay expectations that Americans do, this is kinda scary. You can’t really compete with a robot, can you?

So, the waves of destructive creation — or, well, destructive destruction — are moving through the entire globe. And you can’t hide from them. Unless you are a member of a secluded Amazon tribe, then you probably could. But if you are a citizen of any other country, you have to react due to the globe-enveloping effect of globalization.

#2. AI and automation

I’ve been writing in tech for several years now. I am not an AI professor at MIT, but I am seeing the real effects of AI in the real world.

For instance, I am seeing a proliferation of SaaS. And I am currently looking into opportunities to work with SaaS companies with regard to e commerce and other adjacent niches.

So, the core of the SaaS business is that AI that enables users to get some tasks done without the manual effort being taken. There are no employees, squashed inside the SaaS app. They aren’t toiling away in Indias, doing tasks for you. It’s all AI.

But the global population is growing.

Chart of the world population growing

So, the two factors are coexisting. The first being that the AI is taking away jobs from folks. And the second being the fact that there are more and more folks around. But the number of jobs isn’t growing.

Wait, there are so many jobs and opportunities. Are you a nay-sayer?

I am not a nay-sayer. I am actually learning web development in order to enable my migration from tech copywriting into PWA development or continue combining these two fields in order to deliver value to my customers.

The idea is that there are a lot of folks in Africa, Latin America, India, Asia who don’t feel as highly treasured and fostered by the global community. Maybe, it’s been like that throughout the world’s history, IDK.

And even if it’s been like that throughout our existence, then it feels like the automation trend is exacerbating this overall trend.

At the same time, it’s getting clear that the global population can’t just grow that fast continuously. As people get more education, they don’t want to have that many kids anymore. Instead, they want to spend time travelling, reading books, going out and learning new things.

That’s why it’s totally OK to expect that the current growth spurt will terminate around 2100.

Here’s the chart.

The world population stabilizing by 2100

So, in essence, there’s going to be a period of strong growth. Then, we will stabilize and we will move forward with a more stable cadence.

But even if we do that, then the effects of AI and automation will be huge.

How will Ai impact us?

Honestly, I don’t know. But, from what I am seeing, it’s completely fair to expect that AI can easily replace A LOT OF JOBS.

And I am not talking about drivers who are surely going to be replaced by self-driving cars. I am talking about software developers, teachers, surgeons, police officers.

Then there would be sex robots.

They would be extremely similar to humans. In all the minute details. You would be able to design their appearance. They would have their own emotions, and there would be romance.

But, in essense, you won’t need to deal with the secnd human in order to have sexual relations. This is going to further deteriorate the independence between individual humans, local communities, countries and continents.

Thus, North America would be able to sustain itself without any assistance from outside. Today, it’s not possible since we in North America purchase a lot of products from Asia and other countries. This clearly shows that we aren’t independent of other parts of the world.

But, with the use of AI and 3D printing, it would be totally possible to print any products right within your local town. And with the use of green limitless energy, North America won’t need to consume fuel from other parts of the world.

Physical resources seem to be the only thing that will keep us cohesive

In terms of metals, rare metals, wood, water and similar substances — well, as far as I understand — there are no methods, currently in use or under development that would enable you to produce metal out of non-metal substances. Or that would enable you to produce wood out of other materials.

But, at the same time, we are currently seeing the rise of neo-materials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCuZC-CRg4Mb

Engineers developing the technologies that we would use to build houses on Mars understand that it’s not feasible to transport metal with the mission or mine for it on the planet. It’s clear that the pioneers would have to deal with whatever they’ve got at their disposal.

And dirt is all they’ve got. And already today there are full-blown experiments which have robotic arms welding dirt on top of other dirt, building completely livable vertical units.

What I am saying is that if North America doesn’t have that much gold, so what? We would probably be able to replace this conductor with something else.

The same goes to water, wood, plastics. Whatever.

Human resources are an irreplaceable component then?

Surrogates would be able to be used to quickly increase the population within a specific territory.

So, all in all, it seems that we are on the verge of the collapse of the globalization era. It started at some point in time, but now it’s coming to an end. And it’s not because of xenophobia.

#3. Globalization is coming to the end

The globalization kicked off not because people were super-amiable and they want to be friends with tribes around them. Amazon tribes who got left by the global civilization just live out there in the jungles. They are not “civilizational losers”, but they just don’t have the incentive which would make them to get drawn out of their shell and start exploring the environment around them and, concurrently, get mixed in together with other tribes around them.

Globalization started for some reasons and at some point in time.

Why and when did globalization start?

What is globalization? Globalization is the state, in which the countries around the world are seeking to collaborate together because they feel like it.

We are super-calculating species and we would never do something which isn’t good for us, without being coerced to do so. So, the countries around the world started to cooperate together because they saw some good coming out of it for themselves. And not because some specific hero/politician said so.

I guess that prior to the Industrial Revolution communities would exist independently and they would have some “tentacled connections” between each other. People would travel from one to another, people would marry other people across those communities, communities would fight each other.

The tentacled connectedness was sustaining itself right from the beginning of our civiatlin 10K years BCE, and then through the Industrial Revolution and right up to the nuclear bombing of Japan.

I guess that at this point, the tentacled connections just stopped existing and instead of them we found ourselves immersed into the societal gooey.

Well, people kinda still believe that they live in some specific countries and that there are borders between those countries. But it’s all complete BS.

The borders and countries have been existing only prior to the nuclear bombing. Right at that moment they stopped existing. Because at this very point the nuclear war might easily break out and terminate almost all of humanity on this planet.

This is the first time in our civilization that this happened

Just think about it. There’s never been a way for a single person to affect other people in such big numbers and with such instaneouty as with the nuclear bombing.

Yes, there were extremely high numbers of casualties during WWI and WWII, but nothing like that.

That’s why it looks like we have been transformed into something different at the time of the use of the first nuclear bombs. And I don’t think that countries exist as we know them anymore.

It’s just that changes take time. I expect that in 50–100 years there would be super-structures around the world(s). There would be Americana, Europeana and Asiana. And that’s it. Having 200 countries is just not practical anymore.

Why isn’t it practical to have 200 countries anymore?

Because you differentiate between the items you have in front of you based on the differentiating principles.

Salt is such a ubiquitous thing these days. But at some points it was extremely expensive and you could probably exchange it for something of value. Today, it’s just salt.

You don’t count the amount of salt every month. This action won’t deliver a significant uplift for the value of your assets.

The same thing is with countries. There’s basically no difference between France and Belgium, should the war break out.

And I am not talking about cultures and communities and nations and languages. I am talking about the bare necessities which sustain themselves during the tremendous upheaval.

Wars have been the most tremendous upheavals in our civilization.

So, we are going to be interconnected, but not globalized

So, we are going to stay connected. Countries would be strongly disincentive from trying to go it alone. Just looking at North Korea would immediately convince you that trying to succeed without being engaged with as many countries as possible is a recipe for a societal disaster.

But, at the same time, the dependence will start to recede. Local communities would gradually coalesce into self-sufficient units which regulate their own business processes, mitigate their waste production and try to find a sustainable balance within their biome.

This state would be called something like unit-ization

In this state, the communities would grow their numbers. Those folks would slowly migrate to Mars and elsewhere.

#4. Automation jobs will be the only constant

In these super-localized and self-sufficient communities, folks would migrate across jobs with extreme ease. You would be able to be a superintendent one month and then become a construction project manager.

The ability to migrate between jobs would be enabled through the use of AI and automation. You would have all the tools at your disposal, so that you could manage pretty complex projects.

Folks at the top won’t manage those projects that much as they would “order” them. It’s like when you go out to a sushi restaurant. You may know how to make sushi, but you never actually cook them at your own home.

This trend gets much deeper when you use a mixer. You can mix eggs on your own, but you can’t build a mixer on your own.

And it gets deeper and deeper as the complexity of projects grows. Think the Manhattan Project.

The big question is whether we would need folks to migrate between jobs at all

The biggest question to me is whether we — as, like, humans as we know humans now — would need other folks to actually migrate between jobs and “order” underlying smart architecture to deliver on the projects. If you think that it’s “we” who knows best what we want to order, then think twice.

Do “we’’ know how to teach our kids? If yeah, what’s up with the ridiculousness of curriculums and their complete detachedness from reality?

Humans are super-complex and we are getting much complexer with each passing day.

It makes much more sense to delegate the tasks of actually figuring out what we need to machines.

Then the question is “why” do we need “us” then?

And that’s when the society will start asking questions as to why we actually need folks around?

It’s the same as with carts and horsepower driving them. There were a lot of coaches around. Folks weren’t expected to drive themselves, in general.

Then came the automobiles. The coaches just stopped existing. It’s not feasible to anybody to drive a horse-driven cart in a city. They’ll get murdered within several seconds.

The same thing will gradually happen to drivers, teachers, doctors, politicians, financial advisers, traders, copywriters, software developers, waiters and other professions.

They would stop existing because having a robot-waiter makes much more sense — they don’t require salary or tips. The restaurants using the robot-waiters would have a pricing advantage of non-users. And they would slowly squeeze out the latter out of existence.

And if somebody tries to “help” robo-waiters, that person would get electrocuted to death. Because the robot-waiters would dock into small channels within the walls and they would travel 1–2 kilometers to the closest distribution channel where the dishes would be placed inside of them. You can’t really get into that thing and start helping it.

It would be similar to pushing the car in order to “help your engine”.

So, what the heck would “we” do with “ourselves”?

It’s plausible to say that we are on the brink of the launch of trans-humanism. Thus, there will be a gradual merger between our biological bodies and AI-powered technologies.

We would probably have chips implanted in our brains that will enable immediate connectivity to the Internet. The neural networks operating on top of the distributed cloud architectures would bolster the cognitive capacities of the brain by tens, hundreds, thousands and millions of times.

In practical terms, the use of chips might help us deal with Alzheimer’s disease. A person would be able to re-download the lacking memories from the external drive whenever the biological neurons aren’t doing their work.

This process has already started with Neuralink actively testing the technologies on monkeys (link — https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-neuralink-works-monkeys-human-test-brain-computer-interface-in-2020/)

Your or my attitude toward these developments doesn’t matter at all, in the grand scheme of things. Anybody who’s going to go against the technologically-driven progress would be similar to a luddite. And we all know that they haven’t been able to do anything about the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution.

There are two scenarios with regard to the developments that will take place within the next 20–30 years:

A. Orwellian Scenario: society broken down in castes, people not being able to hide their emotions and feelings, totalitarian control over the human soul.

B. A Better Scenario: societies gradually adjusting to changes by implementing safeguards and laws regulating the brain-computer connections, privacy. We will be able to distribute the improvements by helping poorer communities to gain tremendous value through the use of innovative agricultural technologies, desalination and medicine.

C. Super-Rosy Scenario: we all jump around wild flowers, singing songs.

C is hardly a possibility, while B and A might co-exist in different nations. Just like the political regimes are coexisting right now.

Thus, I can find myself either living in A or B.

And I am OK with this possibility.

What I am doing right now is this: I am content writing for IT businesses, gradually getting valuable connections and gaining hands-on experience, while I am also learning webdev in the evenings.

Since I believe that AI and automation are going to be the only constant, and those that deal with those scopes are going to be in the highest demand, it makes sense to try and get closer to the core technologies.

So, my journey into the webdev will empower my subsequent journey toward the outer technologies within AI and automation. Those technologies that have already been packed for the use by coding talent (but not by core data scientists).

Data science and machine learning aren’t that difficult to learn over a certain period of time, provided the person invests adequate time and effort. Thus, I might end up as a citizen data scientist in a couple of years.

What is clear right now is that any actions with regard to gaining valuable skills and insights in either webdev or AI/automation are going to pay off handsomely over the years.

I am not saying that all other professions are worthless and people should immediately start the migration journey out of them. I am saying that if you already have a profession, it makes perfect sense to get some exposure to the use of machine learning and deep learning in your field. Today, you don’t have to deal with lots of math in order to take the first steps in this direction. This is going to turn you into a valuable talent who combines both the domain knowledge and machine-learning-related skills and knowledge.

Conclusion

The above list of the major changes in the society I’ve created is strongly focused on IT technologies and the rise of AI. Of course, there are some other big changes including climate change, commencing space exploration, potential observations of alien UFOs by army and navy, political changes, the rise of the commust capitalism in China and many more. I didn’t try to create a comprehensive compendium about all of the major change vectors, I was basically trying to justify my strategy of “copywriting every day and making money, while also learning webdev in the evenings, and thinking about gaining more insights into AI and automation over time”. In a way, this article has helped me to come to terms with tremendous changes our society has been going through. These changes are big, and nobody can argue about their existence. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is planning to test the brain-implanted chips in 2020. This is not the future. This is the now. We are starting to implant chips in the brains. And it’s pretty clear that in several years we are going to see some humans obtaining inhuman capabilities by connecting the brains directly to the internet. The only (as we think) that differentiates humans and machines is the actual drive to do things that we want to do. We believe that our drive comes from the free well. True, we have a certain degree of the free will, but a lot of our decisions are made based on the chemical reaction and our environment and not just the free will. Thus, we might immerse in a pretty bizarre reality whenever we have stopped needing to sustain our bodies and have uploaded our consciousness into the cloud. With robots maintaining the server cities on the ground, we will roam the clouds. Doing what? Pursuing what goals? Seeking what in our existence? The biggest thing on the block can be living a life of a human… It’ll have a hefty price tag, and you’ll have to toil away in a cloudy office for six months non-stop, so that you can save up the money and have fun in the “underlying reality”. We are super lucky to get this experience for free — yet -, right?