Are You Making Yourself Obsolete?

A lot of us use automated processes that make things easier for us.

For example, we may set our domain names to automatically renew. Saves the time and trouble of doing it manually. Also prevents forgetting to do so, or thinking you've already renewed it, and losing a domain (or two or three...).

But, then there are people that, perhaps, take things a bit too far.

There are, for example, social networking sites which were designed to allow people to interact, socially, online.

But, there are those that automate their social interactions.

They automatically follow or unfollow people.

They have posts automatically sent to their social networking accounts.

Then, taking things further, they'll have sites which scrape and/or spin the content from other sites so that their content is automatically created.

So, what we have are automated websites, automatically creating content, whose links are then automatically sent, to be sent to people who are not actually being interacted with, some of which may be using automated tools themselves, so they don't have to manually sort through all the automated stuff they don't care to see.

In other words, we have entire networks of websites and social networking accounts where information is being shared by no live people--just bots and other automated systems.

If the Internet ever became self-aware, how long do you suppose before it'd realize it really didn't need us anymore? After all, most of "our" interactions are really the Internet "talking" amongst itself.

A good number of marketers have managed to take the "social" out of social networking and replaced it with automation, and then come here, scratching their heads, complaining that MySpace/Twitter/Facebook/whatever just isn't working anymore.

Well, you know, computers generally don't buy stuff. People do. So, when you remove people from the equation, it's not terribly surprising that your sales might suffer.

There's a point at which automation becomes detrimental.

Think about it. Automated systems cannot create something out of nothing. The starting point is something created by a person.

You can be that creator, or you can be part of the automation system. The thing is that it's harder to replace the creator than it is to replace the automation. So, if you're not the creator, you are very replaceable. Anyone can set up an automated system. Anyone can duplicate that. You've made yourself obsolete, even if you do not realize it.

It's harder to automate originality.