Be creative, be creative, be creative....

It's nice to see a professor and acclaimed expert spell out an argument you made at an earlier time.

So, we'll indulge in our quip "With autonomous cars potentially coming to a road near you in the foreseeable future, taxi drivers may find their real worries are only starting.", brought to you in September 2014 in the post The Uber Fights - Taxi Driver 2.0.

In today's Spiegel Online  on the lack of preparedness of Germany for the digital revolution, a bona fide professor states taxi drivers won't be needed when self-driving cars become ubiquitous.

Of course, we can claim our six months advance is a sign of creativity.

But it is also likely that someone else made that very same observation before we did.

Bummer.

And if it wasn't the exact same statement, you can be sure that a more lofty, abstract one can be found which encompasses the taxi drivers and a slew of other jobs. In fact, we are so certain this last statement is true, we won't even bother to find a matching quote in some scientific paper.
 
The current wave of articles warning about job losses is tied to a new study out of Oxford saying that roughly half of the current jobs are threatened by the digital revolution.
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As with previous studies, warnings and scifi literature, the basic recommendation for staying ahead or just keeping afloat in the job market is: be creative.

And our initial response to it is the same as before: not everybody can be creative or creative enough, and you cannot run a whole country with bartenders, barbers, politicians and media professionals plus those jobs related to maintaining and disposing of humans (healthcare and undertakers). More soldiers is not a good long term solution either.

Creativity has saved humans before, so we can be sure some great ideas will emerge and help us out. Will they be enough?

The blogster would find it preposterous to answer yes or no. So, instead, let's look at creativity itself.

Much of what we see as creative around us is not in the least bit creative. Almost all of fashion has been there before, some of it for thousands of years. You don't have to watch British archaeologists in a Time Team episode discuss whether a necklace pendant found in some English field is Roman or Victorian to get the point.
New materials make a difference, as do new processes but that's about it.

The sad truth is that the fundamental spark for something revolutionary needs to occur only once in a world as interconnected as ours. While the telephone was invented on different continents roughly at the same time, many things digital have but a single instance of creation. Once created and once a patent has expired, it's a free for all.

So, the bona fide professor says, for instance, Apple doesn't make its money by selling a computer or a phone but through creative combination of devices and content.

Which matches what the teacher of the course Novell Network Administration twenty years ago told the class when he waved the floppy disk with the software to emphasize his point.

Physical goods are produced where it can be done as cheaply as possible, no issue with this, so let's come to possibly the only original contribution of the blogster: "not stuff" things.

The term virtual might have been expected, but we are not using it here. "Not stuff" is our category for everything that is not hardware. And, to exasperate intellectuals, we include food, trees, water, clothes, condoms, books in their paper incarnation, even computer files as physical representations of bits and bytes.

What we are trying to get at is the "money for nothing" concept which has been around for some time but has really taken off in recent times without (as far as we know) being recognized as an "instrument of production" or an industry by itself.

Take intellectual property, usage rights, and license fees. We still think of them as belonging to industries, the movie or the music industry, the software industry or the publishing industry, but they have been morphing into a "money for nothing" industry right under our noses.

Meant at some point as a means to ensure compensation for a creative activity, their extension in terms of years of protection and in scope is, or soon will be, turning them into free money.

And that's where the blogster sees Germany unprepared for the digital revolution on one hand and extremely well prepared for it on the other.

While the business ideas, the algorithms, and the creativity of most things digital have largely originated outside of Germany or, if they sprang up in Germany, were bought up quickly by US companies, Germany is a leading nation in the "money for nothing" industry.

German consumers pay billions in abstract usage fees every year, and the sector is expanding. Cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, smartphones, photo copiers, and other products already come with usage surcharges for copyrighted material, and this is on top of standard patent licenses. You may never put an illegally downloaded song or movie on a USB stick, yet a small amount of the store price for each and every one of these items goes to "creative" industry rights enforcers.

The German government shows no sign of backing off in this area. The most valuable, in terms of revenue, coup in the area of money for nothing in recent years has been the revamped "fee" for public broadcasting. A fee of just over 200 US dollars per household plus a tiered fee for every commercial entity in the country fill the coffers of the "public" broadcasters to the tune of some 8.5 billion Euros each year.
This is money for nothing because actual listenership and viewership has been declining steadily and is at around 48% right now.
Days of major sporting events are being broadcast on the public's dime (around .4% or broadcasting time account for some 5% of costs), and despite anger and court challenges, the system is expanding into print media.
The internationally well known German music rights association GEMA was raking in about 2 billion Euros a year in 2013 and is taking in more now.
A new rights association of print publishers was founded a couple of years ago to enforce payment under the "ancillary copyright" law with mandates that internet news aggregators need to pay royalties for text snippets. While Google has managed to stave off these demands by offering a "let us use it for free or we de-list you" policy, the publishers and the government are not giving up the fight for a whopping 11% of ad revenue associated with aggregator listings.

So, even without a detailed tally of the current "money for nothing" industry, it is well over 10 billion Euros a year in Germany alone.

Add a vibrant cease & desist industry (where Germany is also the leading nation), and you get an even better idea of the concept. 

In relative terms: this is more than the smaller German states make in annual revenue, it is more than most of the German federal government departments' annual budget, it is about one third of the German defense budget, and also more than one third of Germany's annual payments to its 4.3 million recipients of basic social benefits.

The trick is to make people pay for products or services independent of use. Imagine everybody had to buy a car, even if they couldn't drive or did not want to? With "non material products" (aka services) this is almost absurdly easy to accomplish - if you can convince government to pass the needed laws.

Creativity?

Give it a try, then.