Herding Bits, Not Sheep: The Evolution of Work

Premise

There are two fundamental components that make up the content of most of our lives in 2020s :
A. Physical things (baryonic matter)
B. Digital things (information, represented in 0s,1s in this young century)

Till about 1950, before the Anthropocene truly began, world trade, world GDP and the lives our grandparents lived was all about A (Physical things)

Once Computers, Internet, cheap bandwidth, Smartphones and Wifi truly took hold most of world trade, world GDP and our lives in the G7 became all about B.

Case in Point : Your dad read a paper book then (a Physical thing). You now read a eBook now (a digital thing)). Humanity now fabricates 1,000 times more transistors annually than the entire world grows grains of wheat and rice combined.

In 1920s : Oil was Oil.
In 2020s : Data is the ‘New Oil’

Cheap air travel and Zoom will ensure our world will keep getting smaller and ideas and connection will be the currencies that matter, while Physical things will relegate to the background because manufacturing them will be automated and cheaper by the year. Think the price of TVs and PCs. And soon … homes!

Metaphor

My (and your) great great great grandfather just may have been a shepherd.
He herded sheep/cows. (Physical things : Baryonic matter)
His great great great grandson (me, you) is a DIGITAL shepherd.
You and I herd information on a screen. Digital things, represented in 0s,1s.

Because what we in the 2020s mostly do is shepherd information into the right excel cell, slide, email. From another excel cell, ppt slide, email sent to us, after some ‘analysis’.

From Shepherding Sheep to Shepherding Bits. Sure it’s a rough metaphor but it helps me make sense of this new order we are rapidly moving into.

Implications

Before Covid most of us in the G7 had to move ourselves to an office building to then move information around, on a screen, in the building, in the business district. During Covid most firms realized digital shepherds can move information around from anywhere. So Digital Shepherding is steadily becoming ‘location agnostic’. There is resistance yes but the trend is irresistible.

So much of what will happen in this century will come from this one single epiphany. And when AI can (inevitably) do digital shepherding better than the current crop of workers, the downstream impact just may be a re-migration of people working with A (things) again, leaving B (Bits – 0s,1s) to A.I.

And so, just maybe, the grandchildren may be shepherds again i.e working mostly on and with Physical Things.