What Kind Of Mental Models Do We Need For The Next Ten Years?

Monday, 9.28pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. – Carl Jung

What would you do differently knowing what you now know?

What rules would you suggest your children follow?

A few of mine that come to mind are simple ones.

1. Be early. If you can’t be early, be on time.
2. Always take notes.
3. Learn how to make good choices about money, starting with keeping accounts.

Others are harder, and they start to contradict themselves.

Like.

1. Work hard. But also work smart.
2. Cultivate a deep knowledge of a field. But also have a broad understanding.
3. Study hard and get a good job. But you could lose it at any time.

There’s a thing that happens when you first go to a foreign place – once you see something you can’t unsee or unlearn it – and you often forget that others don’t know what you know.

There’s an experiment that shows this with young children.

If you put a box of chocolates on a table and ask a child what he or she thinks is in there, the answer will be “chocolate.”

If you open the box and show the child that the box is, in fact, full of pencils, close the box and ask the question again – this time you’ll get the answer “pencils.”

The interesting thing is that if you now ask the child what another child will say if asked the same question (a child that doesn’t know what’s in the box) the answer will be “pencils.”.

Now that the child knows what’s in there it’s hard for them to imagine that someone else doesn’t also know what they know.

But, as you know, they don’t.

So are there things we should talk about because it’s possible that not everyone knows?

I think there are – but there is also a problem – it’s very hard to just “know” something. Even if you’re told about it you have to go through a certain kind of experience to be able to appreciate it.

It doesn’t matter how many descriptions you read of a foreign place – going there teaches you something you just can’t learn from the explanation.

Perhaps media is different – if you watch a documentary or movie – effectively living the experience through a simulation – perhaps that makes a difference.

You can see how complicated this is. Perhaps that’s why YouTube is such a learning revolution – it makes it possible for us to follow along rather than learn through instruction and then practice on our own – which may explain these 13 hour sessions where you see someone build an app from scratch and learn how it’s done.

Let’s get back to my point – what models do we need now?

First, what models did we already have?

400 years ago we had butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Small businesses, one-person bands, providing products and services.

200 years ago we had factories and the rise of jobs. Factories needed people to do specialised work and needed people to manage others doing work and we ended up with the modern industrial system.

Which is how we think of work even now. A job. Something we do from 9-5.

Then you have post-modern ideas of work that leave the factory model behind and instead operate a network model of some kind. One where connections and small groups do something for someone else.

The last 50 or so years have resulted in a bunch of jobs that have to do with administration – what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs. I’m not sure that’s fair because just like factory work needed supervisors knowledge work needs people who do something similar – administration.

Where are we now?

Well, the rise of generative AI could mean that lots of people will not be hired to do certain things – like copywriting or programming because people can use those tools to get the results they want.

But I think it might be more complicated than that.

Average writers and programmers may be able to save time and have the AI write average content for them.

But good writers and programmers will also get the AI to write for them, and because they’re good they’ll probably pull further ahead.

After all, if you give both an average hobby cyclist and a professional racer the same new shiny bike, which one will do better?

The only way for someone to catch up with someone who is doing better now is to have a better bike. And that’s not what’s happening.

Each innovation will end up making those who are already doing well do even better – widening the gap between the have and the have-nots.

These are not equalisation technologies – they are difference multipliers.

It means that if you start a business now you need fewer people to get more done.

Twenty years ago I saw businesses doing things with 20 people that I could do with a spreadsheet. The same thing applies now – you can build capability that doesn’t need as many people as before. That’s what technology does.

I was watching a programme where a character was searching for his goat.

The goat mattered because it gave him 2 litres of milk a day and his family survived on that. That’s less than a pound a day. Although in 2021 it turns out that it was more like £15. So an improvement.

But that’s not the point.

If you’re one of the have’s – count yourself lucky.

Because this is a multi-generational challenge to address for the have not’s.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh