Monday, April 24, 2017

Bloomberg — Jack Ma Sees Decades of Pain as Internet Upends Old Economy


Change is not the issue, since change is inevitable. Rather, the accelerating pace of change is overwhelming many and leaving a lot of people behind. Unless this is modulated, social disruption will result from disruptive technology.

Bloomberg
Jack Ma Sees Decades of Pain as Internet Upends Old Economy
ht Automatic Earth

2 comments:

Peter Pan said...

This was the message 30 years ago prior to free trade. The proposed solutions remain largely the same (retraining, lifelong learning, multiple career changes). Whether he presents this as painful or wonderful, it is assumed to be inevitable and necessary. It isn't.

When specifics are laid out, "change" is not inevitable. Same for "progress", which by its very definition allows for the possibility of failure.

What Jack Ma said will not coax his audience out of their comfort zone.

Tom Hickey said...

It seems to me that this type of change is likely to impact the developed world negatively by causing disruption of the status quo, but it will affect the emerging world positively, since they will just leapfrog the developed world.

For example, land lines were never installed in the emerging world. They even leapfrogged dumb phones and just went right to smart phones.