But what if most or all customers are connected to the invoicing system and can be directly debited? Automation can solve the cash flow issue too. IoT helps with connectivity of automation.
Scott
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As far as the Internet of Things and accountants/finance is concerned this will be a very long, long time in coming because there is a great deal of interest to be made from with-holding payments.
A very long time ago banks sent money transfers to other financial institutions by mail, then telegraph, then fax and now instantly through their secure internet connections. Both time and technology have changed but the banks still insist on exorbitant charges, Three Working Days, currency charges, etc. They are also delighted when weekends and public holidays intervene.
Hawala/Hewala/Hundi and later Bitcoin along with other Fiat currencies solve this problem but they are all struggling to overcome the current financial system… and perhaps never will 
I don’t think it’s a Luddite attitude to be aware of a future problem that will come as a result of progress - no one in the video or otherwise who is reasonable would argue that our technological advances are collectively bad - I wouldn’t think. What we need to do is simply think about how to proceed before we arrive at that state of being? Just like any huge life change in your own personal life - having a plan ahead of time generally makes things easier. It’s just more difficult when it’s such a fluid issue, and we’re talking about the future direction of the workforce/economy of nations, as opposed to individuals.
sadly if history is anything to go by, war seem to be the answer to most problems.
Something that does concern me is the amount of power we consume, often without realizing it. Just think in 30 years ago if you wanted to exercise you’d go for a jog. Now you need an ipod and a heart rate monitor on your motorised treadmill. Even searching the internet consumes vast amounts of power, but it’s not ‘seen’ by the user so its not considered a problem. I’d be interested to know how much extra power is being generated to run the millions of mobile phones and laptops and desktops.
Don’t know whether i am lucky or unlucky to have known the time before emails and the internet. Has ‘being connected’ to ‘everyone’ actually made people happier or actually more connected?
And the amount of people on the planet. I often wonder why no one is talking about that.
Because they don’t know how, probably. At least not at any level that matters. What elected leader is going to say the words “Population control” 
But you’re right, it should be part of “the discussion” that we should be having.
Indeed, that’d be political suicide. I don’t even think we need to go there though, not in the explicit ‘one-child-per-family’ sense, like China. It’s been shown that when the women in a society are empowered (better access to education, birth control etc) they tend to have less children, and later. There also seems to have been a lot of interesting developments in renewable energy tech lately, so it might not all be doom and gloom.
Going back to the video that @jeffreylees shared, anyone who enjoyed that might also find this article on self-driving trucks interesting, which goes into more detail about the potential economic side-effects. He only mentions it briefly at the end, but the author believes that a shift to some kind of universal basic income is a solution to the issue of mass-unemployment due to automation.
Mass-unployment? Why? True, jobs will disappear but new, different ones will be created.
You should watch the “Humans Need Not Apply” video, it makes a good argument against that idea.
Can’t while at work. I will not be able to watch it till tomorrow
Very nice post, a reminder that we should be more careful and thoughtful of our actions. I remember the series I was watching for a while, Person of Interest. In any case, I think this is the best time for us to be more careful about what we put up or share online.
It is very similar to what we are facing with our company. We are a 45 yr old company that has been doing manual paperwork since, well, our inception.
We sell and hold insurance education classes, classroom and online. We have been faced with the problem of very slow turnaround times for exams and for people that don’t require exams, ones that need updates to their accreditation only, we hold their paperwork until all the exams are graded, then the entire class is authorized.
We have gone through all of the process flows, we just recently hired a systems analyst to do this, and found that if we make just a few adjustments, we can turn around each course in as little as 1/5 the time than we currently do.
It’s not going to be easy, changing the mindset around here but if we want to stay viable in the 21st, we will need to.
So I’m resurrecting this because this Dilbert comic made me think of this topic.
At what point does technology have to be a part of our lives that we can consider ourselves the weapon used by the killer (technology)?
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The internet is gradually becoming an integral part of our life. People use it for shopping, banking, paying bills and what not. But the security risks which you have mentioned are also there, so now we need an advanced security system to safeguard our valuable data.
If such a thing exists (which I doubt), this still does not take social engineering into account. Raising people’s awareness of online scams and fraud (and the methods of those that perpetrate them) is equally as important, if not more so.
Yup, it is the same as with sexually transmitted diseases. The best form of prevention is education.
Scott
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Technically it’s now STI’s (infections) .
#themoreyouknow
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Thanks for educating us.
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