The Evolution of Work: From Hunter-Gatherers to AI

Work has always defined what is possible in society. The nature of our work establishes frontiers. Work changes the way we organize ourselves, in communities and companies. If you want to try predicting the future, look at the work we engage in, but also understand how work has gotten us to now.

It's believed that Homo sapiens are somewhere around 300,000 years old.

Until around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer tribes were the way of life. Tribes survived by being mobile, in constant search for food, similar to most wild animals today. This was the only function of work, find food and rest to find more. Their society was only about 100 people.¹ 

Imagine a group of 1,000s of humans walking around an area of land looking for food. It’s not possible. Ecosystems have thresholds, or carrying capacity, which cap a population's size based on the habitat. If they killed a herd to feed all 1,000 people the environment would not sustain them. But roughly 11,000 years ago something changed.

Agriculture was invented. This was the first big innovation. Suddenly tilling and farming became a form of work. With them the paradigm shifted. A simple change in work altered the organization of society.

Hunting tribes had to be small, but farming allowed for villages. Society grew by 10x. Suddenly, with a new line of work, early farming settlements like Catal Huyuk had over 10,000 residents.²

Despite learning about many different cities throughout history, these cities were nothing before the industrial revolution created new types of work. Paris, for example, had a population of 300,000 in 1600.³ Urban work primarily involved caring for horses, working in a shipyard for trade, or operating some form of small craftsmanship. 

The United States Census Bureau indicates that more than 94% of the U.S. population lived in rural areas in 1800. London only held a population of 1 million during this same time.⁴ It was a challenge to support cities the way we do today. Think about trying to feed millions of people before cars, trucks, refrigerators, etc.

The Industrial Revolution led to rapid urbanization and population growth in cities. Industries formed, and with them came skyscrapers. By 1901, three-quarters of the UK population was urban. London nearly tripled in size.

Work underwent a dramatic change. There was a shift from small workshops to larger factories. Administrative jobs were created. Technical talent began rising up. Traditional craftsmanship and agricultural work began to decline.

Whole new categories of work arose.

The cycle of specialization and diversification

Every trend in human history can be explained by looking at the nature of work at that time. While the nature of work can be explained by the innovations that brought us to that point.

Innovation creates a cycle of self-sufficiency and interdependence.

During an economic downturn there’s a retreat towards self-reliance. In economic advances, brought on by innovation, an increase in interdependent cooperation. Each innovation introduces some new level of complexity. A little bit more knowledge to society which drives more specialization.

Hunter-gatherers were just that: either a hunter or a gatherer. Agriculture introduced farmers. Today, you specialize in something and buy everything else. This breathes life into markets which have allowed a higher level of organization to occur.

The lasting theme across history is a narrowing of work and a broadening of everything else. Put another way, there’s a gradual increase in specialization and a diversification of consumption. This is a theme that can be dated back to the earliest societies.

Innovation drives productivity and progress

Innovation is about usefulness. It provides us with one of two things: new ways of operating and organizing or quicker, more effective ways of doing the old.

This is reinforced by how economists measure the impact of innovation. There’s three economic indicators used to track innovations usefulness:

1. GDP growth. Studies have shown that increases in innovation (measured by factors like broadband penetration) correlate with increases in GDP.
2. Job creation. Innovation creates new jobs. Some estimates suggest each tech job supports three other jobs in the economy.⁷
3. Productivity growth. Breakthrough innovations have been associated with increased productivity levels across firms and sectors.

The impact innovation has on your life is primarily enabling you to do more work – to be more productive.

Innovation makes the world more orderly and less random, but infinitely more complex. More and more self-sufficiency is traded for mutually beneficial collaboration. 

As a result of these interdependent relationships, the world gets more output and the support to progress knowledge. Society shifts to form around the most effective means of collaboration.

The fourth place: Redefining modern society online

By 2025, an estimated 32.6 million Americans (22% of the workforce) are projected to be working remotely.⁸ This is a new trend of work that has never been seen before in history. Every job is beginning to come online, if it’s not already. People working in tech, finance, and other service jobs use the internet in their work everyday.

Many people still live in cities, but work in their home.

Your environment is made up of a few important places. Home is our primary place. You spend the most time here and it’s the first place you connect with others. Work is your second place. The reason work is such an important part of history is because the second place has always determined where the first place is located.

American’s uprooted their lives to move north during the Industrial Revolution in search of work, only to leave behind the Rust Belt today.

In sociology, no matter where people lived they always formed a “third place”. A social yet personal environment somewhere between their house and job. A place where you connect with new people, but also with yourself. For some people this was the local pub, church, or a cafe.

A shift in our work has removed a lot of people’s third place. Hovering above everyone’s third place is a new virtual “fourth place” created by the internet.

The fourth place is beginning to define the shape of modern society. Audiences have formed around creators, giving life to new modes of work that didn’t exist before. Niche communities across platforms like Reddit provide the space for people to specialize more in their interests. More shopping happens online because the diversity of what’s available through the internet is almost infinite.

This is a modern trend that will continue to shift not only society and work, but culture as a whole.

The rise of the information society

Work is undergoing another massive shift. There’s a pool of data that exists across the internet driven by us spending more time in our fourth place. This created a fertile ground for training extremely large AI models.

In 2022, the first large language models (LLMs) were released to the public. Generative AI is finding its way into everyone’s work by automating the boring stuff. An innovation equally as useful as the internet.

Generative AI is on track to check every economist measure for impactful innovation. GDP is expected to grow by trillions of dollars in the coming decade. New jobs are being created that didn’t exist 10 years ago, like a prompt engineer. Not every job will be fully replaced by the technology, but it will support many roles boosting productivity overall.

Society and culture will be defined by the ends of a barbell.

On one end is what machines can do better than people. Where automation can replace low-skill tasks. The roles that once fulfilled this work are “information poor”. It’s impossible to compete with the quality and certainty of a machine. Competing against automation creates perfect competition, which drives everything down to zero.

In a society driven by machine learning, information is gold. The other end of the spectrum is the “information aristocracy”. These people have all the information and talent necessary to take advantage of the new technology. 

Society as a whole will enjoy a high level of freedom. No longer confined to one location. New innovative ways of operating and organizing will spring up as the way we work transforms. The highest valued skills will become your ability to create and learn.