Steemit will lead us into the Imagination Age

Steemit is well positioned to be a leader of the Imagination Age

In the near future, it is becoming obvious that a lot of traditional jobs – manufacturing, customer service, transportation, farming, construction, etc – are going to be automated and streamlined by AI and robotics.

Image courtesy of B3tan Bloop

So how can we survive in such a world? The only industries where humans will still have an edge will require critical thinking, empathy, creativity and imagination. These areas will become the primary drivers of economic value, in what will become an imagination economy. We are just on the cusp of this era, with early platforms like Youtube and Facebook (which did not exist fifteen years ago) now household names, constantly increasing the demand for user-generated content.

The imagination economy is defined as “an economy where intuitive and creative thinking create economic value, after logical and rational thinking has been outsourced to other economies”. So jobs involving predictable and repetitive physical work, as well as data collection/processing/analysis, and even linear customer service are most likely to be automated and taken over by tech. However, it will be difficult for machines and software to be as effective as a human in areas that require complex decision making, planning, interaction, collaboration, imagination and creativity. Well that’s a relief!

Image Source

If you look at the publishing industry, for example, jobs here are actually declining, as the processes are fairly linear and predictable. However, the creative component parts of this industry are experiencing growth, with more demand for designers, illustrators, photographers, writers, etc.

However, the skills required to foster creativity and imagination are not innate or intuitive, and the education system needs to adapt right now to encourage children to work on development in this area. Simply learning facts and figures will become redundant, but what will be important will be learning how to source information, then interpret it and act on it to create value.

Image courtesy of B3tan Sleekloon

This is where a decentralized platform like Steemit comes in. Monetary value is put on creativity and imagination. There are many great artists, photographers, writers, comedians, thinkers and analysts on here that are getting rewarded for their content at the point of production, and not through an intermediary like Youtube that relies on advertising and a large following to reward its content creators, or Facebook, where the posters gain visibility but no direct value.

Sure, Steemit has it problems (whale dominance, vote selling, bot armies, shit posts, plagiarism, etc.), but as an early-stage platform it is heading in the right direction and has a lot of room to grow hand-in-hand with the imagination age. So keep being creative and bringing value to the platform in whatever way you can!

One final thought – in many ways we are already living in our imaginations. Every human invention or construct – a smartphone, a building, a spaceship – was once just an idea knocking around someone’s head. It took hard work and technology to develop these ideas into something concrete, but the world we have designed around us is all a result of human’s ability to imagine. If we couldn’t do that, we’d be still be sitting a cave throwing shit at each other…

Let me know what you think about the imagination age, and how you see yourself adapting to it in the near future?

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Further reading:

• Wikipedia - Imagination Age
• Forbes – Imagination: What you’ll need to thrive in the future economy
• McKinsey report – Where humans could replace machines and where they cant yet
• SMU Cox School of Business - Imagination Age: America’s Forth Wave of Economic Progress – PDF Download

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Thanks to B3ta users for the images. Check out more top images from this community (and a perfect advert for creativity from the imagination age) from @b3tan.

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