In the first month of January 2020, automation and digitalization are already obsoleting jobs mostly black people hold down. This is not a new trend - the most affected population by any disruption/transformation will be black. However, this digital disruption and transformation will be greater than the production-changing impact of the cotton gin towards black life in our American History. 

Many black folks who were strutting around acting like they fancy are going to get it the worst in 2020 and these are those “I don’t need a man” ADOS women and so-called “rise and grind” black entrepreneurs, both do business using third-party workflows and platforms rapidly becoming digitized. 

In this article, we are going to talk about how every income class of black folks are going to feel 2020 disrupting their life. However, you should expect two things from this article (1) African-Americans will ignore this article and keep hanging out on Instagram acting clueless, act in denial until 2020 get real on their ass. And once 2020 get real, it will be too late for black folks to catch up and they have no one but themselves to blame. (2) A lot of smart African-Americans thinking ahead see where digitization is going will ride the wave and not only thrive, they will see that digitization was a lot easier than anything they done in their life and prosper fast and quick as the disruption itself.  

Marginalized Black Folks

When I went to Taco Bell the other day, there was only a drive-thru person serving the customers in cars – no front counter cashiers. I used the Taco Bell kiosk to place my order with Apple Pay. When I went to a McDonald’s which have a hard time keeping employees, the manager told me to just use the kiosk and look for our number on the flat screen panels and went further saying she not hiring front counter cashier anymore. Doesn’t look like the fast food workers winning that $15/hour wage fight – look like the fast food industry is already replacing them through kiosks. 

The marginalized black folks who need those fast food jobs are literally on the border line of trying to find their next meal and if they can’t work McDonald’s they will engage in illicit activity to put food on their table. In plain language, cats are going to be carjacking, home invading, street mugging, flash mobbing, selling sex and more to make ends meet for them. This sex/violence crime trend was already developing but will rapidly manifest itself in 2020 within black communities due to rapid disruption. 

Many marginalized people will try to work gig economy jobs but many have convictions and records preventing them from having a driving-based job, or drug history working jobs in a warehouse and these gig-economy jobs are low-paying dead-end jobs that are competing with warehouse sorting robots and self-driving cars. 

It does not take much to push a marginalized person over the edge because they are not living check-to-check, they living meal-to-meal. 

Middle Class Black Workers

The middle class are no better off – machine learning and workflow automation can do the work of the average corporate job paper pusher and mid-level decision maker. If you do a job where you just write something up and your work has to be signed off by someone higher – workflow automation will replace your job very soon. Many middle-class black folks be bragging they make $80 to $120k a year and finance Cadillac Escalades and think they special doing the electric slide at the bougie club – year 2020 going to sober up a lot of these middle-class folks. 

Look, I was around in 2001 when 9/11 hit and you need to remember 1999 and 2000 was the dotcom boom and black folks were “paper millionaires” back in the days and make a killing off Internet stocks and financing no-doc jumbo loans for 7-bedroom 4-level McMansions in Atlanta. And after 9/11 those same fancy people were thrown out of jobs and those that had six months or more in savings depleted their money trying to save their Escalade and McMansion until they had to move back in with their mom in New Jersey and sleep on momma couch – the term “couch surfing” was born. 

There is a Fourth Industrial Revolution trend many middle-class workers are not aware of that will take them out just as fast as machine learning – low to negative interest rates. Modern financial technology is basically making markets so efficient that high interest rates can no long be justified – bots will be smart to squeeze money to reduce lending needs. Right now in Japan, they have below zero negative interest rates and they are mass laying off Japanese workers in the banking/finance industry by the thousands right now. This also happened in the UK banking/finance sector as well. This will happen in 2020 where interest rates are low. This paragraph is above many black folk heads right now, but come back and re-read this paragraph once you see this impact take place in later in 2020.

Middle class assets like homes and stocks and 401k – come on, those were wiped out in 2001 and 2008, don’t know black folks even talk about these things in 2020 like they are safe investments. Only skilled value streams aiding in digitalization is going to save some black middle class folks who adopt to changing trends. 

Black Hustling Entrepreneurs

So-called black hustling entrepreneurs are not even safe in 2020 because the majority of so-called black entrepreneurs do affiliate programs where they just a white labeled agent reselling someone else platform and products. No matter if it is real estate, insurance or beauty – automation and chatbots will be driving these processes with no need for humans. Listen very carefully to a so-called “rise and grind” black hustler entrepreneur on Twitter and what they claim they do as a business – listen carefully because what they described; a machine learning software can do the same thing right now in 2020.

But there is another factor – you know what going on in Vietnam, Cambodia and Philippines right now? They have women standing behind green screens looking at a video camera where the green screen can transform into a background of Chicago downtown, London or an office building or behind a corporate logo talking to a customer and displaying options, signing e-signature contracts, displaying QR codes to make mobile payments – same tech online gamers use for their gameplay streaming video channels. The one game-changing factor people miss is Southeast Asian women physical phenotypes can make them look Asian, Latino or light-skinned black with a little cosmetic adjustment to appeal to the majority of the world for business transactions over the Internet.

These so-called “rise and grind” entrepreneurs cannot out-hustle robots and “more affordable” (cheap) labor so in 2020, these “do for self” black entrepreneurs are going to be in a world of shock. Because we are looking at a lot of these affiliate programs doing exactly what I describe – creating virtual agents in Cambodia and Vietnam and creating chatbots and QR codes and not looking for any black affiliates to resell anymore. 

The real black entrepreneurs who got those tech skills will find plenty of new opportunities in 2020 if they pay attention to global entrepreneur trends, especially in Shenzhen, China ecosystem right now. 

2020 Will Either Be Great or Horrible for Black People

If you are a marginalized brotha or sista, either you can just watch more and more kiosks being put up to replace low-paying entry jobs or you can learn how to build and create kiosks that can power your own fast food business in your hood and let machines manage your money and inventory and buying – it is not as hard as you think and poor people can create these programs – I’m from the west side of Chicago, don’t talk to me about what a hood person cannot do – we can do anything we motivated to make happen. 

If you are a middle class person, either you can walk around smiling pretending you matter to the company that paying STEM cats $200k-400k to digitized business operations to save the company tens of millions to fire employees to impress Wall Street investors or you can figure out how to create your own digitization solutions that you can run as a parallel hustle, not a side hustle because you will be running two main income drivers to your household that focus on staying in tune with the transition. 

Quite frankly – if you are a black person, don’t stand around me talking about your punk ass hustle and claiming you got money – unless you holding a Chinese travel visa or got a Chinese boyfriend/girlfriend hooking you up with wholesaling white labels to put on Amazon or distribute worldwide to merchants, you just talking some basic shit in 2020 at the social gathering, but nice suit you wearing though. The hustle is global worldwide and you sitting here still doing pissing contests against one black person versus another black person – how funny. The real black entrepreneurs that know how to go where the money is at (London/Shanghai/Toronto/Tokyo/New York) and focus on global value streams are the one that going to have the solo voice when they talk about how they getting down in 2020.