The Great Diffusion

I would love your feedback on my recent TED Talk!

A few weeks ago I gave my first TED talk (at Sonoma TedX).

This was a special experience for me. When Out-Innovate was published in April 2020, I had 2 TedX talks scheduled (diving into specific sub-themes in the book). But, with Covid, these were unsurprisingly cancelled.

So here is a new talk, with a new idea. Would love your thoughts - it is a theme I’m exploring writing a lot more about. And if you could view/like/share, I would be grateful.

Full text below.

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When I was 4, I was asked the question. You know, “the question”: what will you be when you grow up?

I exclaimed confidently: I’m going to start a garbageman business with my brother. Yes, I dreamed big from the start. I would drive the truck - of course - and my younger brother would pick up the garbage.

The problem, as I discovered, was not my tender age – it was that our local government had a monopoly on the garbage business in our city that would be hard to break.

This talk is not about garbage, local governments or entrepreneurship per se. But it is about the macro environment - the global forces of centralization that crushed my young dreams, and the opposing forces that are coming next. I hope to convince you that in the future, the centralized platforms that have shaped the last 150 years will be dissipated by a coming wave I call The Great Diffusion.

Before I tell you about the great diffusion, let’s reflect on where we’ve been.

Over the last 150 years, unprecedented technological progress brought massive socioeconomic change – ever-consolidating, urbanizing, monopolizing change. 

Just look at the mega factories in integrated global supply chains who, in the name of economies of scale, bring us everything from our iPhones to clothes to our food, with inputs and manufacturing ranging from the Congo to China. Yet they also falter at the faintest flickers, like the auto industry did with a chip shortage in Taiwan.

Or look at the mega-businesses – from groceries, to home goods, to accounting firms - that concentrated across industries on the promise of synergies, but who hollowed out competition and local small business along the way.

Or look how our physical world around us was built to support this centralization – large powerplants, highways and airports all connected hub and spoke. Donut shaped rings, built around centralized cores, sprawled to became megacities, reshaping our society and devastating our environment.

Until today, it was cheaper and more efficient to get bigger – as big as possible. Until today, every aspect of our work, how we live, and how we organize our communities has been consolidating.

That era is over.

The next wave of technological progress will also offer us unparalleled economic and social change – but this time, it will be de-centralized change. The Great Diffusion is already starting to make itself felt in almost every industry and corner of our society, and we’re only just getting started.

Production is moving from mega-factories in far-flung lands to be closer to home: localized, small, and real-time. Star Trek told us about 3D printed meals and Star Wars promised robots. While not – yet – in our homes, 3D printing is already manufacturing everything from clothing to furniture to rocket engines.  And autonomous robots are picking strawberries, folding laundry and defending countries.

Forget Zoom - Virtual reality headsets will move knowledge work – think accountants, lawyers, venture capitalists like me, really any white-collar work– out of monolith office buildings once and for all. Did you know you can tour a house, learn the guitar and have a fully immersive movie (or conference call) already?

New infrastructure like space-based internet, autonomous driving, solar systems, and next generation batteries will mean life and work can happen closer to home – or, as far off-grid as we want. And if the promise of flying cars is ever realized, it will transform everything from road access – will we even need them? To  regional travel.  

All this and more without even mentioning artificial intelligence – which will accelerate each of these trends.

As the diffusing future, morphs from dozens of isolated snowballs on a mountain side to an all-consuming avalanche of change, I’d like to focus on what each of us, individually and in our communities, can do to understand and to meet this challenge – and to take advantage of its opportunities.

I’m a parent. So now, when I think about the future, I think of my kids, to whom the diffusion era belongs.

What will my daughter’s choice of work look like and how should she prepare? Even if she chooses to be a doctor like her grandmother or a window salesman like her grandfather, the default will shift from employed to entrepreneur. With virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a range of software tools - she will be able to rent the scale of the largest players with software and there will be no need – nor possibly the opportunity – to join a mega-conglomerate. And even if she wanted it, a full-time job might not be the default. The gig economy is fractionalizing careers well beyond taxi drivers and delivery, extending itself already into teachers, nurses, accountants and designers.

In a diffused and diffusing future, my daughter will not need to climb the conveyer belt career. She will enjoy more agency in her life. She will also be competing with everyone, across the world, on a much more even footing. This is a beautiful outcome of diffusion – a more inclusive and diverse future. Studies have long shown that diffusion trends like remote work and gig economy lower workplace bias and increase accessibility.

Further, we know that her menu of professions will be very different from today – and that it will continue to shift in ways we may not yet be able to imagine. If we’re manufacturing with robots and 3D printers, shipping less, and what’s left is powered by driverless cars, what then of manufacturing jobs and truckers? And as artificial intelligence continues its meteoric rise, what then of book keepers, travel planners and assistants?

But as for what’s coming: new jobs are already emerging. Prompt engineers for chat GPT, virtual reality experience developers or… bot ethicists.

The era of centralization was an era of job-first. Our jobs dictated where and how we lived in every sense. This will not be the case in the era of diffusion.

So when my not-yet-two-year-old son leaves home, where will he go and how will he live?

My spouse and I had to leave the small city we both grew up in to pursue our chosen careers, seek advancement, and work on global issues. He will face no such tradeoff. Places like Sonoma and Marin where we live (or Winnipeg, where we’re from) won’t suffer brain drain. When viable, world-class careers can be found closer to home due to greater connectivity, the rationale for large, centralized cities starts to unravel. He will live in the local community he wants, not the one he was forced into. Where centralization created the nuclear family, diffusion will ease its pressures. 

Wherever he ends up, he won’t just plug into his virtual reality job and stop there. He will have the opportunity – and responsibility – to build the more intentional communities of the future. More small businesses and solo entrepreneurs mean the ability to solve for more local needs. But more than that, diffusion if well executed will mean less – less waste, less long distance transport, less destruction. A more sustainable way of living. But most of our infrastructure, our laws and our community were built for the centralization era. These will need to be reinvented locally, nationally, and globally – and will need the efforts of every person at every level.  

So how should we prepare our children – and our children’s children – to meet a future that looks simultaneously like our pre-industrial ancestors’ village-based pasts and like our most outlandish sci-fi novels?

My daughter believes she has the answer.

She just turned four and was recently asked that same question, about what she wanted to be. She proclaimed: “I want to be an Artemis!”

Artemis is her name. Yes, yes, I know – classic millennial Marin choice. And yes, she’s in a pretty literal phase right now – but, she’s on the right track. We named her after the Greek goddess of the hunt, the moon and protector of women.  A force of nature. That strong and uncompromising sense of self, that drive, and that fierce defense of the vulnerable (both human and natural)– will serve her well in navigating – and defining - a diffused future.

We might need a dash of something else though – my son’s name is Cassian, named after a family philosopher ancestor who gave away the family’s estate to support his family and lived through WWII. What I’m saying is, this wasn’t a guy who would make his younger brother pick up the garbage. So we’re talking about adaptability, a learning mindset generosity and grit.

And perhaps most radically, that strong sense of belonging to a community (or communities) outside of work that our current culture so conspicuously deprioritizes.

In this Kaleidoscopic moment of change, we can all prepare ourselves and the next generations with the skills for a diffused future. What is one thing you might do differently knowing the changes that are coming?

So who will you be when you grow up?