Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard predicts that the next big thing in business (a potential trillion dollar industry) will be to help people become smarter. Whether it’s tools like smartphones or body performance enhancing drugs or even chip implants, people crave to become smarter and faster than their compatriots, especially in the current recession.
Karlgaard says:
It is dawning on people, in this age of the Scary Smart, that the best — really, only — way to play the economic game successfully today is with high IQ, creativity and energy. We therefore will pay for more IQ, creativity and energy. This is why energy drinks and smart phones have been two hot categories in a cold economy.
But we’ve only seen the beginning. The Scary Smart business will start to command larger portions of GDP.
Today, everyone’s job and career is on the line. In a global economy that:
1. Increasingly favors the Scary Smart
2. Ruthlessly culls winners and losers
… Workplace intelligence becomes the next trillion dollar industry.
Smart phones. Smart data. Smart content. Smart drugs.
I'm certain this scenario sounds scary to some. Dystopic, even.
It's hard for me to find it either of the above.
One notion of value it points to is the idea that differentiation is value. This isn't that profound, it's really just to say that if you're smarter than others, or you tire less than others, or if you're faster than others, then you've achieved a kind of value to others.
It's part of the idea of scarcity, which I argue is a pretty high-level order of value: "smart" isn't valuable; scarcity is valuable. Consider as an analogy: "fast" isn't valuable, rather it's the case that scarcity is valuable. Imagine that a hundred years ago I told you that in the future there will be machines that make people faster, which is fine enough, but people will be able to purchase this fastness and there will be businesses built around selling these machines that "make people faster than their compatriots." And expected you to feel worried about this scary future where humans bought fastness.
We now know these machines as automobiles. And we also know that the status and value one derives from their automobile has much less to do with its speed and much more to do with its it's scarcity.
So the above article makes me wonder: what is it exactly that's being called "smart" here? I think we can rest assured that there will always be some distinguisher between "smart" and "intelligent" or "wise." Or whatever you want to call it, really - I'll likely just continue to call it scarce, which is to say that true value in the realm of "smartness" comes from the ability to identify and act on what everyone else isn't.
(I imagine this is exactly why Hugh decided to draw the below):
