Don’t be a human alarm clock

If you’re worried about being left behind by technology, stop obsessing over tools.

Start obsessing over problems.

Before alarm clocks were common, people paid humans to wake them up - called knocker uppers.

If you were alive during the 1800s Industrial Revolution, you had to start your factory shift before dawn. Being late would mean being fined or losing your livelihood. Alarm clocks were expensive and unreliable. To solve this you would pay knocker uppers to tap on your window to wake you up.

And for over 100 years this worked.

But, technology improved. Alarm clocks became affordable and the human alarm clocks became obsolete. They resisted change by defending their tools - reaching clients without waking neighbours, tapping without breaking glass, waiting to confirm clients were awake.

Instead of resisting change, they should have obsessed over the Job To Be Done: “Help me be ready for my shift.”

If they framed it this way, the future could have looked different. They had the customer relationships and could have sold alarm clocks instead of competing, or expanded into new services such as breakfast delivery - the original DoorDash perhaps.

People fear both technology disruption and FOMO. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA frames technology as enabling new ideas:

“If you think about a company and say if we improve productivity, then they need fewer people - well that’s because the company has no more ideas.

But that’s not true for most companies. If you become more productive and the company becomes more profitable, then usually they hire more people to expand into new areas.

So long as humans have more ideas, the prosperity of the industry which comes from improved productivity, results in hiring more people, more ideas.”

If you don’t want to be left behind by technology like the human alarm clock, stop obsessing over tools and start obsessing over problems and ideas on how to solve them.

References

• Singh, A. “Who and What Was a Knocker-Upper?” JSTOR Daily, 2023 September
• Acquired podcast: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, 2023 October