In the world of business, startups and technology, disruption is a fashionable and widely discussed topic. Rarely does a week pass that we do not hear about a startup or technology company disrupting an industry or traditional business model, displacing countless workers, creating millionaires and billionaires seemingly overnight and catapulting young geeks into the realm of pop culture status.

The topic is so common that it has even become cliche to discuss. We’ve all heard the stories of Spotify, Netflix, and Airbnb among countless others, and now it’s newest victim Hollywood.

Automation and networking play a large part in this disruption, almost without exception.

Automation and Networking

The one-two punch of automation and globalization has shaken small town America to it’s core, uprooting families that have become accustomed to living a middle class life for generations, and pushing them closer to and under the poverty line.

Doom and gloom politicians pit our distrust of technology against our own best interests in the race to win the minds and hearts of the voters, promising to bring back the old world economy and resurrect deprecated 20th century manufacturing, ignoring the data telling us this is all but a pipe dream.

While it can’t be denied that jobs are being displaced, what seemingly gets less attention is the other side of this story, which is the tremendous potential for wealth creation and job growth spurred by these innovations.

Automation is hard

Popular culture conveys the idea of automation like some sort of magic, something that happens almost effortlessly when companies choose automation over their previous models.

In reality, automation is extremely complex and requires skilled, educated, specialized workers collaborating and creating new and innovative ways to solve extremely complex problems. The end result must be an order of magnitude more efficient (than the previous human intensive processes already in place) in order to make business sense.

Hiring these workers is not cheap, and the more automation that is happening, the higher the demand is for engineers, designers, product managers, and countless other people that go into this ecosystem, driving the demand and wages for these people higher and higher.

The interesting part is that the average wage for jobs that are in demand usually far outweigh the wages of the jobs being replaced. When a minimum wage fast food employee is replaced by a computer screen, it is certainly not something to be celebrated, but there is a glaring opportunity there that must be pointed out and exploited.

What if that same fast food worker could spend 6 months specializing her skill set and go back into the job market demanding 5x her previous wage? What I just proposed is the reality of the world we are living in now in the year 2017. The problem is that these opportunities are not taken seriously by the majority of people, at least not yet.

The root of the problem lies in this: many do not yet value technical jobs in the same way that they do traditional jobs.

A very common argument or attitude is that people claim that they are not “technical” or interested in technology.

Logically this is an invalid argument. All of the research in the world right now points to the fact that skills are not inherent, they are learned. If you are struggling to find work in your field or have a family to provide for and have been laid off from a 20th century job, ignoring numerous glaring opportunities to get back into the job market because of your personal job preference could be viewed as entitled to put it nicely.

This would be the equivalent of a Mississippi resident living 200 years ago saying “sorry, I’m not ‘agricultural minded’ or interested in agriculture, so I’m just going to wait until something comes along that suits me”, then complaining that there are no jobs.

The synergy between Automation and Networking

In the next 15 to 30 years, traditional higher education will be disrupted.

Networking and crowdsourcing will make it easier than ever to access world class educators for a fraction of the price of traditional colleges. This means that for much less than what people are paying for the average sub-standard community college education you will be able to access Ivy League educators and academic training, and do so from the comfort of your home.

Coding boot camps and specialized training will also see tremendous growth.

Business is already booming for hacker schools like HackReactor, specializing in software development, that have 98% job placement over the course of 21 weeks with an average salary of $104,000.00, all at a cost of about 50% of that of a traditional state college.