10,000 Years of Human Advancements and Adaptation

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there!

I respect and admire my father and previous generations who have worked hard for their families. The baby boomer generation, in particular, is noted for its work ethic. My father had worked for one employer for 30 years until his employer retired.

However, times change and people adapt to new environments.

For today, I’m sharing my observations about work and career trends from 10,000 years ago to the near future. What can we learn from the past to help us to thrive in the age of AI?

Biggest Fraud in the Whole History of Humans?

I’m reading the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. After reading the graphic novel edition last year, I’m now reading the full book. The author’s ambitious goal for the book was to write the full human history of the Homo sapiens species.

In the chapter entitled “History’s Biggest Fraud,” the author wrote about the agricultural revolution. Why did the writer consider it to be a fraud? What does this mean for us now in the AI revolution?

Harari asserts that the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago led to much more toil and hardship compared to the earlier foraging lifestyle. The advancement was beneficial for growing the population and society but detrimental to individual workers.

Technology is one of these luxuries. Technology can become addictive. Technology often demands more human effort as it transitions from luxury to necessity. Today, for example, as we consider our refrigerator, internet, and leisure travels as necessities, these lifestyle choices require increasing amounts of work to sustain.

Society’s appetite for more AI technologies may ironically demand more effort to maintain them. For example, I see the companies that are most vocal about developing and democratizing AI often struggle to maintain trust and safety on their platforms due to the onslaught of “bad actors” using AI.

1. Reduce Toil and Hardships From Technological Advancements

In your current work, how many hours per week do you work? I hear people commonly working 45-60 hours per week. My corporate internet tech job interviewer said he was working 90 hours per week.

Before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, foragers enjoyed more leisure time. Even modern foragers in the harsh Kalahari Desert work only 35-45 hours per week. Foragers in more abundant lands likely worked even less, hunting once every three days and gathering fruits and nuts for 3 to 6 hours per day.

After the agricultural revolution, the average farmer worked significantly longer hours from sun-up to sun-down each day to tend the crops and animals. See the back-breaking work from the hunched-back woman and man in this ancient Egyptian farming picture below. The human body was not designed to dig and scratch in the dirt and carry heavy loads daily.

With the technological advancements in agriculture, society was able to scale the production of more food for a growing population. However the technology and new lifestyle resulted in more human toil and hardships. More war. More disease. More economic disparity.

Later, during the industrial revolution, people further congregated into cities and worked on highly specialized repetitive tasks such as:

• The automobile factory assembly line.
• The garment industry.
• The typing pool.

People routinely worked up to 90 hours per week in the factories. They worked up to 6.5 days per week without holidays or vacations, and often lived in urban squalor.

In the information revolution, we saw the rise of mass computing, mass storage, and mass networking. Businesses largely still used industrial-age business practices, although now with more labor laws to protect workers.

Now, in the second phase of the information revolution, AI advances offer more work practice choices, including remote work, asynchronous communications, and gig work with multiple part-time jobs.

How to apply lessons from foragers

Consider adopting a “foraging” lifestyle if it suits your stage of life. This doesn’t mean literally finding food in the wild but taking on multiple part-time jobs.

Think of Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek book, which inspired a new generation of workers to optimize for more discretionary time earlier in life rather than delaying it until after traditional retirement.

Pursue a portfolio of multiple income streams: consulting, e-commerce dropshipping, inventing new products, gig economy work, and other online digital creator activities.

If you’re going to work 60 hours per week anyway, perhaps you can work in one traditional job for 40 hours per week in a less intense industry, and spend 20 hours on side businesses to build assets for passive income streams.

2. Build Multiple Sources of Livelihood

Farming communities often planted a single crop like potato or wheat. People’s diets and nutrition were not balanced. They risked famine like the Irish Potato Famine that killed one million people in the 19th century.

In the agricultural economy, people worked extra hard not only to feed their families, but also to pay the landlord and the rulers. However, the farmers still had cottage industries to produce and sell crafts for some side income.

Since the industrial revolution, urbanites typically had only one main job as the norm. That work was very specialized, whether a mechanic, a seamstress, a bricklayer, or an accountant. With the very heavy labor expectations, there was little time for common workers to develop anything beyond a single income stream for their livelihood.

Now in the information age, people get more choices for education and careers and businesses.

How to build multiple livelihoods to prevent starving

My advice is for people to develop multiple livelihoods. If you have multiple income sources and abilities, then you have some flexibility when conditions change. Your industry, your company, and your profession may undergo rapid change. You’ll have other options to pivot to.

Just like the advice to have a diverse financial portfolio, keep a diverse portfolio of your livelihood.

Try some side hustles while working at a main job. If you’re constrained by your traditional employer’s policies of non-compete or conflict of interest, you can still find opportunities to volunteer. I’ve volunteered with schools, Toastmasters, Cub Scouts, and faith-based community organizations, for example.

By either doing side hustles, or volunteering, you’ll gain the skills, network, and personal brand to give you options for additional livelihoods in the future that will keep you from starvation.

3. Be Open to Change

Humans are immensely adaptable for survival!

For millions of years, humans have migrated to different places for better opportunities. Past ice ages and droughts have forced people to move. The “4.2 ka Event” about 4,000 years ago caused a global mega-drought for almost 1000 years. It caused widespread famine to ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and other ancient civilizations, which forced people to abandon cities and move to new regions.

Even rabbits and cows have shown adaptability by changing from vegetarians into meat-eaters as needed to survive.

Humans have an even greater capacity to adapt. Human beings have been gifted with natural intelligence to thrive to new environments.

In recent times, I personally met:

• Marketers and physicists who have become data scientists.
• Data scientists who have become product managers and real estate brokers.
• People who have relocated around the world for a more suitable opportunity. They quickly learn new languages and cultures.

You’re not stuck. You can transform and adapt with new abilities for new environments. You can learn at any age, especially now with the help from AI to accelerate education.

Final Thoughts

Advancements from the agricultural and industrial revolutions boosted human populations and society. However, those technological advancements caused more toil and hardships for individual workers.

Now, in the information age and the AI age, we have the opportunity to reduce the toil and hardship for people. It's not necessarily from enforcing industrial age business techniques like putting workers into centralized locations for fungible assembly line work or office work. Nor is it from forcing people to cultivate one single crop or product.

The opportunity is for individual people to diversify their income streams with a portfolio of livelihoods. Use technology to start a portfolio of new small businesses. Workers then transform to become owners of productive assets. The diversification reduces dependency on any single source of income, such as a traditional job.

If you would like to explore how to diversify your livelihood and start side businesses, please schedule a 45-minute paid consultation call with me. I’ll help you consider your options and the next steps toward starting your own businesses.

Best regards,
Jimmy Wong

P.S. You can email me to learn more or to schedule a free 15-minute introductory call.

Jimmy Wong Coach, speaker, and entrepreneur enabling people to thrive in the age of AI. Data science leader with 12 years experience at the LinkedIn company and 27 years in the industry. Visit aijimmy.com​ ​​​​​​

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