5 decades later can anyone remember one politician step forward and say, “You are the problem?”
Promises breed hope and hope produces inaction. After 50 years of pitches and promises, there is a growing contempt for the voters. The narrative is no longer about rallying all of us around meaningful solutions that require our blood and sweat, the mission is simply to get the vote, no matter the cost.
The problem is that the very people that need the biggest insights are given messages such as one that Mitch McConnell gave to the press. He said, “We ought to get these coal miners into trucking jobs. There are lots of trucking jobs.” As a result, how many out-of-work coal miners signed up for trucking school?
Daimler had just finished its 5-year pilot program of driverless trucks in Nevada. The findings were so positive that Anderson Graduate School recently indicated that today’s 5.2 million trucking positions will dwindle to about 600,00 jobs in just 7 years.
It is time to stop depending on any of our political leaders for a cogent understanding of how to become part of a new world of work where task work is disposable work at best. Artificial Intelligence is bringing cost-free education to the masses. 3-D printing is breeding an entirely new category of entrepreneurs. There has never been a better time to start a business, change careers, and tailor our work to fit our career DNA. Instead of monotony, many of us will find far greater satisfaction is developing work that is based on empathy, creativity, developing solutions, and engaging others in causes that actually matter. I think, for example, of a brilliant scientist that I support. His team is actually part of the cure for cancer. Stepping into his lab for the first time, he waves his arms overhead and says, “Welcome to my temple of hope.”
His is a different brand of hope that keeps long hours and works with others until one molecule turns into a revolution and lives are changed forever. Technology is offering us freedom from tasks. But, if we don’t know how to use that freedom, who is there to urge us on, to tell us the truth? Instead, we have a nation of unsettled workers, their faces bathed in the glow of their cellphones, as our leaders promise they will fix it for us rather than requiring that we think and work our way out of the past and into a far brighter future.
I believe that if the Roosevelts, Eisenhower, or JFK teleported to the present time, they would be stunned.
They would probably look at each other and ask, “How could they have so much and be so soft?”
