By taking labor ever more out of the equation, automation removes any advantage countries with lower wage demands might have, because the costs of technology, unlike labor, are pretty much the same everywhere.

However, automation is not only likely to entrench further structural inequality between countries. Without a fundamental shift in the way economies are organized, it will dramatically exacerbate inequality within many countries as well. It will do this firstly by diminishing opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled people to find decent employment, while simultaneously inflating the incomes of those few who continue to manage what are largely automated businesses. As importantly, it will increase returns on capital rather than labor, so expanding the wealth of those who have cash invested in businesses, rather than those who depend on taking cash from them in exchange for labor. This means straightforwardly that automation will generate further wealth for the already wealthy, while further disadvantaging those who do not have the means to purchase stakes in companies and so free-ride off the work done by automata. Of course, this would not be as much of a challenge were it not the case that since the Great Decoupling, the wealthiest 1 percent of people globally has captured twice as much of the new wealth generated by economic growth as the rest of us. The richest 10 percent of people on earth now own an estimated 85 percent of all global assets, and the richest 1 percent own 45 percent of all global assets.

But for all creative jobs we would pay one incredible employee at the top of her personal market, instead of using that same money to hire a dozen or more adequate performers. This would result in a lean workforce. We’d be relying on one tremendous person to do the work of many. But we’d pay tremendously.

This is the way we have hired the majority of employees at Netflix ever since. The approach has been remarkably successful. We have exponentially increased our speed of innovation and our output.

In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.

This is the paradigm shift that might be required — that organisations and systems can be like people, having purposes without a single goal. An artist doesn’t have a successful career by maximising their art; they do it by repeatedly producing work that they are proud of.

That’s what the world could look like if we got rid of the blind spots. Business ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximisers. The economic concept of optimisation, and the institutions of management and government which enforce its use, effectively act as a brutal information reducing filter. By taking away the pressure to maximise a single metric (and therefore to throw away information that doesn’t relate to it), organisations could apply their decision-making capabilities much more effectively. They could innovate more, design more sustainable solutions and build less adversarial, longer-term relationships with their people.

In short, the average employee is drowning in complexity. And the outstanding employee, the one who has a chance of keeping up, is a much scarcer resource than many managers are willing to acknowledge. We're designing jobs for superhumans, and it turns out our people are flesh and blood.