What 10,000 Years of Human Toil Teaches Us About AI

It’s debatable whether all individuals have benefited from advancements in technologies. Technology has certainly moved civilization forward and increased the population.

However, one of the biggest questions of our time is whether the AI revolution will create more opportunities and joy for everyone, or will it force more toil and hardships for workers.

...whether the AI revolution will create more opportunities and joy for everyone, or will it force more toil and hardships for workers.

As I’m concerned about AI’s impact on this and future generations, I studied the societal and technological trends from the past 10,000 years so that we can better prepare for the future.

Biggest Fraud in the Whole History of Humans?

In the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, the author’s ambitious goal for the book was to write the entire human history of the Homo sapiens species.

In the chapter entitled “History’s Biggest Fraud,” the author wrote about the agricultural revolution, when people first learned farming technologies.

The advancement wasn’t the unmitigated triumph we often think it to be. In fact, the writer considers the promise of the agricultural revolution to be a big fraud! What does this mean for us now in the AI revolution?

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. — Yuval Noah Harari

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.

People got used to the technologies, but ironically the technologies required people to work even harder. Harari calls this dilemma the “Luxury Trap.”

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. — Yuval Noah Harari

Technology is one of these luxuries. Technology can become addictive. Technology often demands more human effort as it transitions from luxury to necessity.

Today in developed countries, for example, as we consider our refrigerator, internet, and leisure travels as modern necessities, these lifestyle choices require increasing amounts of work and income to sustain.

With AI’s allure of improving societal productivity, are we also falling into another “Luxury Trap?”

Ironically, society’s appetite for more AI technologies may demand more work 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?

As I work in the Silicon Valley tech sector, I commonly see people working 45–60 hours per week. When I had interviewed for my corporate internet tech job, the interviewer had said he was working 90 hours per week.

Before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, foragers enjoyed more leisure time, according to historian Yuvall Noah Harari. 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, compared to the previous foragers.

Did workers benefit from farming? See the back-breaking work from the hunched-over 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.

Technological advancements in agriculture allowed society to scale the production of more food for a growing population, but at a great cost. The new settlement 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.

Later, at the start of the information revolution, we saw the rise of mass computing, mass storage, and mass networking. But businesses continued to use industrial-age business practices like concentrating workers into dense buildings.

As we start the AI revolution, we must learn from these past mistakes and strive to reduce toil and hardship. This means rethinking our work practices and leveraging technology to create more balanced and fulfilling lives.

How to apply lessons from foragers to today’s world

To navigate the AI revolution successfully, we can draw inspiration from the pre-agricultural era.

Perhaps consider adopting a “foraging” mindset if it suits your stage of life. This doesn’t mean literally finding food in the wild, but strategically 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 when health is more precarious.

In the new work culture, people can 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 ongoing passive income streams that would give you time back.

Along with contentment and scaling back expenses, this strategy may let you break out of the luxury trap to claw back time from toil for the rest of your life.

2. Build Multiple Sources of Livelihood

Harari highlights the resilience of foragers who thrived on a varied diet.

The forager’s secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet… Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. — Yuval Noah Harari

Farming communities, by contrast, often relied on 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 mid-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, even then, the farmers occasionally 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.

My father, for example, was a tailor in the garment industry his entire life starting as an apprentice at age 9.

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. Today’s workers can benefit from diversifying their livelihoods if they take steps for it.

How to build those multiple livelihoods

My advice is for people to develop multiple livelihoods for resiliency.

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

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. For example, my volunteering with universities, Toastmasters, youth organizations, and faith-based community organizations helped me to grow my skills and network for future livelihoods while I still worked at my main job.

By doing either side hustles, or volunteering, you’ll gain the skills, network, and personal brand to give you more options for multiple livelihoods in the future to safeguard against economic uncertainties and ensure long-term stability.

3. Be Open to Change

Humans are immensely adaptable for survival!

Throughout history, we’ve migrated, changed diets, and learned new skills to survive.

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 remarkable adaptability by transforming 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.

Today, your adaptability is as critical to survival as ever before.

• Embrace Lifelong Learning: Continuously update your skills to stay relevant. Online courses and AI tools can accelerate your education.
• Leverage AI: Use AI to enhance your work and create new business opportunities.
• Be Open to New Opportunities: Be willing to pivot and explore new career paths.

In recent times, from the tech industry, 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 too are not stuck. You can transform and adapt with new abilities for new environments.

With the right mindset and tools, you can thrive in the AI era.

Final Thoughts

Advancements from the agricultural and industrial revolutions boosted human populations but also increased toil and hardship for individual workers.

Today, in the AI revolution, we have a unique opportunity to avoid these pitfalls. By diversifying our income streams, adapting through lifelong learning, and leveraging technologies, we can create a more balanced and fulfilling future.

Let’s learn from the past and use AI to reduce toil, not increase it. As I personally take steps forward on this, I’m coaching others to do the same.

Together, we can build a better future.

Best regards,

Jimmy Wong

More from Jimmy Wong:

• Has AI Improved Economic Productivity Yet?
• Strategies to Learn New Skills in the Age of AI

Story originally published by Jimmy Wong on Medium.