Do You have a Heart?
The next labor?
I always like a good discussion and being an economist-by-training that stumbled into technology allows me to view circumstances and things at many different perspectives.
One thought on my mind is the economic trajectory of humankind.
During the Agrarian Age, moving from simple villages to cities, moving from hunter-gatherer to Agricultural revolution, we manage to satisfy our basic needs through scale via gathering of humans.
We then move on to Industrial Age, where the assembly line was possible because of the gathering of labor in cities and town, and more efficient manufacturing and logistical processes was created. The more pairs of hands, the better. The more efficient the hands, the better it is too. Pairs of hands was the biggest driver of the economy.
Now we are in the Knowledge Economy. Ideas and realization of ideas became more important, especially ideas that can be realized online can scale easily and requires very few employees. For instance, Whats App has 55 employees before it was sold to Facebook and Instagram only had 13 employees before it was sold to Facebook. In this era, the brains is the biggest driver of the economy.
So what is going to be the next driver of economy then, especially as we move into smarter automation, artificial intelligence, etc.
This was an interesting discussion question I like to pose to my friends, to seek more ideas and perspectives. An answer from a friend of mine strike a chord. He was saying it might be the “heart” then.
Think about it, in this age of Artificial Intelligence, we are likely to move to a phase where manufacturing of physical goods can be automated from start to finish with minimal human intervention. Productivity will also increase with Artificial Intelligence and automation. This will lead to spare time. At the time of this writing, countries are now starting to explore a 4-day work week (topic for another issue). People are likely to commit the additional day to leisure, hobbies and entertainment.
If you look at leisure and entertainment, fundamentally they are all about ‘connections’ and emotions, leading to “heart”. We are seeing glimpse of it right now actually with this influencer economy that we are looking at. Industries or business ideas that count on making connections, influencing emotions are likely to be the next big thing. It will be something that Artificial Intelligence cannot replace so soon even if anthropomorphism plays to machine advantage in my opinion. We are starting to see glimpses of it as well. Look at art or even AI-generated music. While one gets very excited initially, once the excitement dies down, people start to realize, “Hei! This (art piece) seems ‘dead’. I cannot relate to it at all. I have no idea what the artist is trying to convey over here…these is no connection.”
Conclusion
Given the discussion I have with my good friend, our economic trajectory has moved from hiring pairs of hands to hiring the grey matter between the ears. What is likely the next phase is going to be the Heart or emotional human connection. New jobs and ideas that takes into account making more human connection might just be our next phase or Age. :)
What are your thoughts on this? Will love to hear from you! :)
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Nice article. Agree that emotional connection will be valued even more. We are moving up the proverbial Maslow hierarchy (although that theory has been debunked!): from food security to energy security to knowledge security and perhaps now toward emotional security.