Knowledge is the new money: you have to keep learning every day
When Benjamin Franklin said that "an investment in knowledge pays the best interest," he forgot to point out exactly what knowledge he was referring to and where it could be obtained. However, in those words lies an essential truth cooked in the current technological and social context: that knowledge has much more value than money. More value from the chrematistic point of view, but also psychological.
So, if Franklin lived right now, not only would he repeat his sentence more firmly, but he would be excited to know the possibilities offered by technology to demonetize goods and services.
Demonetization
Thanks to technology, most of the products and services that used to be expensive now are much cheaper and, in some cases, even free. Gratuity usually appears in those products that can be digitized (transformed from atoms to bits), that is, products susceptible to a marginal cost close to zero. For example, the Google search engine, the Wikipedia encyclopedia or the thousands of hours of audiovisual entertainment on YouTube.
In his book Abundance, Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of the Singularity University, puts a series of examples of demonetization , emphasizing the smartphone. Although it seems an expensive device, we are actually using a counterpart a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than a supercomputer of 1970, and we also save many other things:
Cameras, radios, televisions, Internet browsers, recording studios, editing rooms, cinemas, GPS navigators, word processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board games, card games, video games, a whole range of devices doctors, maps, atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, translators, manuals, first class education, and the ever growing and varied collection known as the app store. Ten years ago most of these goods and services were only available in the developed world;today almost anyone and anywhere can have them.
The cost of energy is also going to plummet soon thanks to the higher efficiency of photovoltaic panels . The personal transport can be shared thanks to the block chain and the merchandise will be autonomous. Artificial intelligence will take on many automatic tasks that make services more expensive, whether medical, financial or legislative. Manufacturing will be democratized thanks to 3D printers and we will end up becoming pro-sumers (producers + consumers).
In other words, to live moderately comfortable it will not be necessary to earn too much money. In fact, thanks to the basic universal income initiatives that are already being experienced, we may not even need to work. Or, at least, not too many hours a day.
Faced with this scenario, earning more money will only be used to obtain conspicuous goods or exclusive services that socially disengage us from our peers. Money, in that sense, will be more than ever, because it will be easy to obtain and will serve little.
The money does not make you happy
But not only the money will progressively lose its value, but this was not even as bright as we had believed.
When we say that we do not have time to learn something new or to read a book, it is usually because we are investing that time in earning more money, directly or indirectly. Most times we worry about earning more money because we believe that we will be happier: we can travel more, buy more things, have a more comfortable home, buy more expensive clothes and, in short, fulfill all those dreams that reflect the ads of the Lottery.
Once obtained a minimum to live comfortably, the extra money hardly affects our psychological well-being
However, all the experiments that are carried out on the link between happiness and money conclude that, once a minimum is obtained to live comfortably, the extra money hardly affects our psychological well-being. For example, a recent study has suggested that people who make more than $ 90,000 a year are not happier than people in the $ 50,000 to $ 89,999 range. Even winning the Lottery has a surprisingly short-lived effect on our well-being, as Nicholas A. Christakis explains in his book Connected to Comparing These Graces with Patients Suffering from an Illness:
In fact, the follow-up of people who have won the lottery and of patients with spinal cord damage reveals that, after a year or two, these people are not happier or sadder than others.
Another study from another business school, IESE , reveals that the winners of great prizes in games of chance qualify their daily activities as less pleasant than the rest.
In fact, it does not even seem that working for money is the most efficient way to work. For classical thinkers, working for a salary could even be labeled as immoral. A job can only be worthy if we do it because we want, otherwise we work more as a slave than working. In addition, the tasks we do without pursuing an economic purpose tend to have more professional results because we are simply passionate: we do not perform the tasks to get a salary or a promotion, but because we enjoy doing it, for the simple enjoyment of doing it well. Aristotle argued that it was incompatible to do something that would perform and complete us and, at the same time, pay us for it. That does not mean we can not do things well if they pay us for it,
The currency of the future, then, is not the bitcoin or any other crypto-currency, but our ability to perform
It was at the beginning of the 19th century that the idea began to generalize that there was only one type of decent work: the remunerated one. If your activity was not remunerated, then it had no value (confusing here terms as different as "value" and "cost"). However, the words of Aristotle begin to resonate again in a technological context where the price of goods and services decreases and the most brutalizing and mechanical works already begin to perform intricate algorithms.
The new currency
The currency of the future, then, is not the bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but our ability to perform, lock good social relations and, above all, acquire new knowledge.
On the one hand, knowledge that we can transform into interesting works that are still to be developed. People who identify the skills needed for this kind of work(for example, software developer) and acquire them quickly will find themselves at the top of the job. Those who work hard but do not take enough time to expand horizons and constantly learn other kinds of things, will be the first to be replaced by machines , as workers once were.
But what happens if we are not interested in that kind of work? And if automation does not allow the entire population to access the world of work? No matter.Knowledge also allows you to buy more things than money, beyond a good job, and even buy things that are not for sale. Knowledge can be transformed into many things, as in more stimulating social relationships. It also allows you to reach goals in a quicker and easier way. Knowledge transforms one's acquisition of new knowledge into a more fun and suggestive task. It makes the brain work better. It expands the vocabulary, making us better communicators. It helps to think better and beyond the circumstances, preventing the tree from eclipsing the forest. It even erases the cent-rum grimace from our faces.
In short, it places individual life in perspective, allowing many other lives to live through the experiences and wisdom of other people.
In this new era of demonetization, then, we have discarded the idea that knowledge is obtained in school and university, and once we reach the labor market we can already live the rest of our existence without opening a single book. In the same way that we force ourselves to go to a gym or to quit smoking, continuing to learn is already the most important medical prescription. And if we brandish again the mantra that we do not have time, just a fact: if the time we dedicate to social networks will be used to read books, we would assimilate between 100 and 200 annually .
Written by
With the collaboration of Yorokubu.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not of the World Economic Forum.