Great questions. I think there will be a great flattening. So the best painters may lose some earnings, but other passionate “painters” with much less skill now have I fighting chance. I think this model really shines when it comes to the megacorporation. There still may be Apples in the world, but their profit margins and total sales will be less. The gap will be more than made up for by the near-endless smartphones developed by many different people. Maybe Apple will be the contract manufacturer for some of these other people’s phones, so that Apple can get a cut, who knows. But ultimately, instead of the owners of capital (in this case, owners of Apple stock) having some great money-maker on their hands (or the executives making mega-tons of money), Apple may have only $22 billion in revenue per year instead of 2016’s $215.64 billion in revenue. The missing $193.64 billion could be going to individuals making their own unique smartphone designs. Assuming a 10% profit margin for those people, and assuming each person makes an average (mean) of $50,000 per year, we can see that this one corporation alone could in the future mean the opportunity of 387,280 well-paying jobs. Competition will be tough for the corporation and for the individual, but the benefits don’t end with the potential for many well-paying jobs. Because there will be so many more varieties of smart phones, there’s huge potential for greater utility and greater sales of the phones. Think about multiple phones for each occupation, and multiple phones for each person with a particular disability or set of disabilities. This is just one industry, every industry could be like this: the flattening and transfer of corporate profits to individuals could be massive.
