If you have attended one of my seminars in the past, you have heard me talking about it – the problem of knowledge.
I am going to go a bit technical here, but please stay with me!
This stuff is important to know!
In my more than 14 years of working as a trainer I met a lot of people who told me that education failed them. I can totally understand them. Because the reason for that is that if you really look at what creates a happy and successful life – it is not the stuff that you learned in school, is it?
I mean how many of us ever needed more than 10% of what we learned in school or later in university?!
Do you still know how to decline words?
How to measure the integral of something for whatever reason?
Or what, when and where Aristotle was born?
For most of that knowledge we nowadays use a computer and the internet.
Peter Diamandis is the founder of X Prize foundation.
This is a nonprofit organization that designs and manages public competitions intended to encourage technological development that could benefit humanity. He said
“Between 2016 and 2022 we will see more changes in the world than between 1900 and 2000.”
And he is right in that.
Although the world has been sleeping a bit because of Covid…
A study of Georges Anderla, a Czech-born French economist who died in 2005, is undermining this thought.
While working for the OECD in the 1970s, Anderla studied the pace at which human knowledge is developing.
He concluded that the knowledge from the year 1 until the year 1500 had approximately doubled.
The next doubling took place until the year 1750 (after 250 years) and the next one until 1900 (after another 150 years).
After later investigations Anderlas there were further doubling of knowledge until 1950 (after 50 years), 1960 (after 10 years), 1967 (after 7 years) and 1973 (after 6 years).
As a result, humanity’s knowledge in 1973 would be about 128 times greater than in year one.
Several scientists took up and continued the investigations of Anderla.According to the philosopher of science Robert Anton Wilson, knowledge has been doubling every eighteen months since the 1990s. Which brings us to more than 250.000 times greater in the year 2020 than at the year zero.
Here is a picture how that looks like:
We are talking exponential growth here!
You probably ask yourself right now: “Why is she pointing this out? And what exactly does this mean for me?”
Wilson said, that the knowledge of human kind is doubling itself every 18 months so, 1.5 years in the years after 1990.
If the knowledge of the human race is doubling itself every 1.5 years, then all the knowledge you have gained until today is only worth 50% in 1.5 years.
Half!
And in 3 years only 25%.
And in 4.5 years only 12.5% and in 6 years only 6% and in 7.5 years only 3% and in 10 years latest your knowledge of today is only worth 1%
So, literally it is worth nothing!
I know, that’s a bit harsh to say, but it is true…
I mean, take a look back a couple of years:
we didn’t have smart phones, we have not been communicating face-to-face on apps on our phones.
For example, the programming skills or the marketing skills I learned in university were already obsolete at the time I learned them.
We didn’t even talk about facebook or social media at that time.
You won’t find that in any of my material from university.
Nowadays you can’t even go around those if you want to be successful in your business.
But there is an an even bigger problem brewing up…
We are flooded with new technology on a daily basis by now. One of them – Open.Ai’s Chat GPT – was introduced in December 2022 to the public and it took 5 days to hit 1 million users!!!!
In comparison: It took Facebook 10 month for that and Netflix even 3.5 years!
The knowledge in this world is changing so quickly, that we can hardly keep up with it anymore.
We now talk about 3D-printing almost everything, having hydroponic farms, growing meat tissue in petri dishes, self-driving cars etc.
Personally, I find the Open.AI’s ChatGPT absolutely cool (and I even wrote a book about it, how to use it for better productivity, which you can get here), but I also find it extremely disruptive.
All of these technologies have an impact on your job and your business.
Many jobs will simply disappear.
Are you using Grab, Uber or a taxi to go from A to B even sometimes?
As soon as you have self-driving cars there will be no taxi drivers anymore.
You can book your car online, like you can already do with Grab.
It just comes, you take a seat, it drives you, where you need to go, and then it is booked by the next person and so on.
Even carpooling like that over an algorithm is pretty possible, to get less cars driving on the streets.
The same with truck drivers and postal delivery.
Already drones are tested to deliver packages and mail.
If you can print so many things with a 3D-printer, you don’t need factories anymore and you don’t need the workers anymore.
If you have printed houses, which just click together, you don’t need the construction workers anymore.
Maybe you think right now, but that won’t affect me, she is only talking about low paid jobs…
Let me be a bit clearer:
If you don’t need the factory anymore, because you can print your own clothes, you don’t need the sewers anymore, you also don’t need the sewing machines anymore.
And because you don’t buy sewing machines anymore, the factory who produces them don’t need to produce them anymore.
So that factory doesn’t need the people working in their sewing machine factory anymore.
Neither their marketing or sales or logistics division.
You don’t need any of that anymore.
And because you are printing you own clothes you don’t even need the store anymore, where you normally go shopping.
So, the sales personal there, the marketing division there, the cleaners all those people are completely obsolete.
You can basically 3D-print almost everything in the future and even the food could come from a “paste” made out of protein, carbohydrates and fat, and be printed into a decent meal.
So, you don’t need the supermarket for that anymore, you don’t need the farms anymore with live cattle because the muscle tissue has been grown in a Petri dish.
Can you see the picture I’m painting here?
Think about it and share in the comments, what this development would mean for you and your job and your family!
Right now, we can already see glimpses of this development due to the disruptiveness of ChatGPT. You can boost your productivity with it like crazy. Business plans are done in hours instead of weeks. Marketing material, landing pages, blog posts, content for presentation written in just seconds – all without the help of copywriters, marketing assistants etc.
But not only that, you can get personalized fitness sessions, lesson plans for teaching certain topics, recipes for leftovers in your fridge, fantasy stories, summaries, financial advises all in the blink of an eye.
Which is the reason why other things are getting way more important:
- Learning, unlearning and relearning things all the time!
- Working on yourself to be the best person you can be!
- And also learning how to keep yourself motivated to do that!
You can’t keep up with that amount of knowledge anymore.
Sorry.
But you can work on yourself to be the best person you can be, to live a happy and successful life.
I am here to support you on that.
If you want to find out, how I can help you, please book a free discovery session with me.
Just send me an email and I will send you my calendar. Together we will figure out, how to make you and your life fit for future.
Because it will be here. Faster then we think…
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hi, I’m Caydee Schwarz and I write about personal development, success and happiness.
Let’s be honest: all of us want to live a happy life and fulfilled life. And every day, a lot of us fail in our attempt to get there. Our thoughts, the right inner attitude and the right knowledge empower us to create our life according to our wishes. Knowing what our mission is and what makes us truly happy is the foundation to a happy and fulfilled life. I’ll help you lay that foundation – so you can live the life you want.