While The End of Jobs sounds scary, the author of the Book, Taylor Pearson makes the argument that the safest and most rational bet for individuals with any level of skill in the economy going forward is entrepreneurship.
Here's a great Tedx talk given by Pearson on the subject.
His hypothesis embraces another one of my heroes Nicolas Nassim Taleb.
Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst,[1]whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.[2]
The Black Swan refers to a Swan only found in certain areas on Australia. The rarity of the Black Swan, makes it virtually impossible for the human brain to imagine if their only reference is WHITE Swans.
The famous example (of a different bird) Taleb uses in his book is the Thanksgiving turkey.
From Business Insider: "Consider a turkey that is fed every day," Taleb writes. "Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say.
"On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief."
Here's Taleb's famous chart.
This is basically the book's entire message wrapped up in one graphic.
The problem that Taleb is really attacking in his book is forecasting, particularly economic forecasting, and the practice of using past events to predict the future.
Using inductive reasoning to forecast future events poses, for Taleb, not just something potentially useless or wrong, but something that actually has negative value.
"Consider that [the turkey's] feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!" Taleb writes.
"But the problem is even more general than that; it strikes at the nature of empirical knowledge itself. Something has worked in the past, until — well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading."
The lesson: If your role in a large organization doesn't involve creative problem solving and value creation take note of the coming era of "The End of Jobs" and most importantly: Don't be a turkey and give some consideration to exploring entrepreneurship--You'll sleep better at night knowing you won't have any surprises involving hatchets, cornbread or stuffing.
