Why Did the Era of Gaining Great Wealth Through Intellect Emerge? — The Evolution of the 'Value of Ability' from Hunter-Gatherer Times to the AI Era —

It was warm today, wasn't it? I went outside myself, and while there was certainly no one in short sleeves, quite a few people were walking around with their jackets draped over their arms.

Now, then...

Introduction

In the modern age, there are people who earn exceptional incomes solely through intellectual labor. However, when you think about it, the vast majority of human history was an era of agriculture and hunting.

I suddenly became curious about how their ancestors survived in group life long ago. In this article, I would like to decipher the 'changes in the evaluation of ability' in human society by looking at the differences between past and present environments.

1. The Hunter-Gatherer Era: Intelligence Was Already a Survival Resource

The first thing to confirm is that hunter-gatherer societies were by no means biased toward physical strength. From the moment of their birth, humans have been organisms that rely heavily on cognitive abilities.

Hunting is often perceived as a test of physical strength. But if you realize that you rarely fight prey one-on-one in hunting, you will notice that physical strength is not the only thing required for hunting.

• Predicting prey behavior

• Memory of terrain and seasons

• Designing traps and tools

• Cooperation within a group

These are clearly tasks that require cognitive ability. In fact, there are still people living by hunting and gathering today, and research on them often shows that the 'strongest hunter' is not necessarily the person with the most physical strength.

Even more important is the fact that human groups were division-of-labor oriented from an early stage.

• Those skilled at hunting

• Those skilled at gathering

• Those skilled at tool making

• Those skilled at mediation and negotiation

It was this diversity that increased the survival rate of the group as a whole. Therefore, it is considered that there was little inevitability for so-called intellectual individuals to be weeded out.

(2) Agricultural Society — Ability Gaps Were Suppressed

When agriculture began, the social structure changed further. However, even here, the composition of 'intelligence equals great wealth' did not yet hold true. The reason is simple: the upper limit of productivity was low.

In agricultural society,

• land

• labor force

• water rights

and other physical resources accounted for a large proportion of the group's survival. In other words, it was almost impossible for an individual's cognitive ability to boost crop yields by dozens of times.

Also, the pressure for communal redistribution was strong.

• Village communities

• tribute systems

• class order

These institutionally suppressed individual prominence. In short, even if differences in ability existed, it can be said that it was a structure where economic disparity was unlikely to widen. Naturally, the phenomenon of 'great wealth through intellect alone' as seen today had not yet occurred.

(3) Since the Modern Era — The Return on Cognitive Ability Exploded

The decisive turning point was the progress of industrialization and informatization. Since the modern era, the main battlefield for value creation has gradually shifted from

• land

• physical strength

• physical labor

from,

• design

• calculation

• abstract thinking

• information processing

to. Furthermore, modern society has a scale effect that did not exist in the past.

For example,

• software

• financial models

• algorithms

• content

Once these are created, they can be replicated almost infinitely. Here, a historically new phenomenon has emerged. That is, the emergence of a society where certain cognitive abilities are directly linked to extreme economic rewards. This is the essence of the modern 'vast wealth through intellect' phenomenon.

④ Future outlook — What will the AI era expand and what will it shrink?

So, how will this trend proceed from here?

The advancement of AI will certainly compress the value of simple cognitive tasks. This is almost certain. However, at the same time, the value of other abilities will actually rise. For example, the following can be cited.

• problem-setting ability

• integrative judgment ability

• social trust-building ability

• creative editing ability

What is interesting is that, at this point, humanity's primal strengths—namely, cooperation and sociality—are being re-evaluated. It could be said that the abilities that were important in the hunter-gatherer era are returning in a different form.

In the future,

• pure knowledge volume

rather than,

• the ability to read context

• the ability to connect people

• the ability to decide amidst uncertainty

—it is highly likely that rewards will concentrate on such more complex abilities.

Summary

Intellectual types have never been worthless in the past. This is because human society has always been built on the collaboration of diverse abilities. However, the modern era can be said to be a time when the economic return on cognitive ability has expanded abnormally from a historical perspective.

And I feel that the AI era, while pushing that bias even further, holds the potential to bring human-specific social intelligence back to the surface.

Thank you for reading.