The Future of Work
Four years ago, a tiny virus wreaked havoc across the globe, changing the course of human history forever. It was a black swan that ushered in many new trends, but also dramatically accelerated a number of old ones that were already well underway.
One such trend was our relationship with work.
In January of 2020, after reading Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek, I asked my boss if there was any chance I could work from home one day a week—just one.
The answer was no: ‘the rules’ didn’t allow it.
Two months later, almost everyone in the company was working from home every day of the week. The next couple of years, from late 2020 to 2022, would mark a historic bending of ‘the rules,’ as workers around the world either resigned or reinvented their professional lives. The labor market went bonkers, as did the investment market. People were buying JPEGs of rocks for a million dollars. Anything was possible.
2023 into 2024 has marked the return of the status quo—but not entirely. Work has changed, and will continue to change. Many workers have returned to the office, but not all of them. Many attitudes toward ‘work-life balance’ will never return to their pre-pandemic state. To say nothing about the civilization-shifting effects of AI on the horizon.
To understand the future of work, however, we must first understand the past. We must go back and, like a river, find the origins of the trends around us—not only to see where we are, but to see where we’re going.
The History of Work
Modern work is an anomaly in the annals of history.
The earliest form of work was that of the hunter-gatherer: individuals working in small tribes hunting and foraging for food. Research tells us that most hunter-gatherer tribes worked less than 20 hours a week, spending the rest of their time at leisure.
With the discovery of farming, it soon became possible to sustain many people in the same place. And so, we transitioned to an agrarian society, where people no longer had to constantly move and ‘commute’ for work, but could instead settle down and provide (i.e. farm) for themselves. This was the original work-from-home. In medieval times, carpenters, blacksmiths, butchers, and numerous other professions emerged as extensions of ‘the home office.’ With the arrival of the Industrial Age, however, ushered in by the steam engine, workers everywhere began to migrate from the home to the factory, then the home to the office—a trend that continued right up until the last 30 years or so.
With the arrival of the Internet, however, a new age is upon us: the Information Age—and in the words of Naval Ravikant, “the information age will reverse the industrial age.”
Here’s how we think it could happen.
1. The Rise of Work-From-Home
The Internet has been promising us telecommuting for decades now. It only took a virus that killed millions of people and forced the world into isolation for that promise to start shaping up.
We now have all the tools and acronyms (VR, AR, AI) to make remote work seamless—and many employees and employers are seizing the opportunity. Employees simply not having to waste hours commuting twice a day is often a game-changer on both a personal and a professional level. Employers, meanwhile, aside from saving vast amounts of capital on office space, can avail themselves of the best talent globally. Talk about a competitive advantage.
OSV is a testament to that. Our entire team is entirely remote. Aside from a few meetings, we work mostly async—this very magazine is written, designed, and produced across three different continents and at least six different time-zones.
Of course, nothing beats in-person collaboration for spurring ideas and innovation, but the flexibility of working remotely is proving hard to match—which brings us to the second big trend.
Geographical Competition for Talent
The obvious knock-on effect of working from home is that people no longer need to live near their work. Some might choose to live closer to family, some might choose to leave the bustle of the city, others might choose to become ‘nomads’ for a while.
Countries and states already compete for corporations—there is a reason so many US companies choose Ireland as their European base, and that 60% of Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware—but now, with the rise of remote work, perhaps both countries and corporations will have to start really competing for skilled workers on a global scale.
2. Reduced size of firms
In the US, from 1994 to 2019, the number of new startups rose sharply, but the job gains from these companies fell—so even though new startups have 90 percent of job growth, older firms still have 86 percent of total employment. But why?
Ronald Coase, in his essay, “The Nature of the Firm”, talks about why companies are the size they are. People begin to organize their production inside firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm. Today, however, our new fleet of revolutionary technologies are reducing transaction costs at an unprecedented rate.
The Fall of Transaction Costs
Payment processors handle payments, so no need to build a payment system in-house; cloud providers provide hosting and other services, so no need to have server hosting in-house; AI firms provide models-as-a-service, so no need to spend millions training your own.
Critical functionality must still be taken care of in-house, of course, but everything noncritical can be outsourced to companies that can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Moreover, these external transaction costs are only beginning to fall—better will become even better; faster, even faster; cheaper, even cheaper.
We’re already seeing the rise of solopreneurs who make millions with few to no employees. @levelsio makes millions a year working alone, and @justinwelsh has crossed $5M in revenue from his one-person company in less than four years.
The Rise of Fractional Jobs
Alongside the rise of individuals working for themselves, we’re also seeing an emerging wave of people having multiple jobs. The subreddit r/overemployed has plenty of examples of people working multiple jobs: some out of necessity, many simply because they can maximize earnings.
Working from home, with no set schedule, has given people unprecedented flexibility with their time. At OSV, for example, we have a mixture of full-time and part-time team members, who—thanks to the freedom of working async—also have time to spare for non-OSV projects, personal and professional. Gumroad is another great example of people working a set number of hours and spending the rest of their time however they choose!
We may see more employers embracing this, whether they like it or not—for the recent wave of new technologies is threatening to upend the world of work as we know it.
3. AI goes mainstream
In 2022, artificial intelligence went mainstream.
While research in the space has been underway for decades, the release of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion catapulted AI into the limelight. And rightly so, generating a realistic image with just a text prompt was a paradigm-shifting innovation.
But the real push came in November of 2022, the month that marked the release of ChatGPT. Excluding Meta’s Threads, ChatGPT is the fastest product ever to reach 100m users, crossing the line less than two months after launch.
If trends continue, AI will likely unlock a productivity boost unlike anything we’ve ever seen. As with any new technology, of course, there are concerns about its potential negative impact on existing jobs. OpenAI itself came out with a list of the highest-paid jobs most at risk.
As pointed out in the Financial Times, however, AI uplifts the performance of those who use it—especially low performers. The ones who fared best were cyborgs or centaurs: humans that used AI as an extension of themselves, not a replacement.
When the automobile went mainstream, horse carriages went out of business. The world’s coachmen didn’t just disappear, however. We got taxi drivers. When the camera was invented, the demand for portrait artists fell, but new forms of art quickly emerged to fill the space. We got photographers.
Humanity has survived innumerable changes in its environment, and those who thrive are invariably the ones most open to change itself. With AI, unpredictable as it is, the chances are pretty high that some branches of knowledge work will be impacted pretty drastically. For some, the transition period will be smooth; for others, not so easy.
But, as Jim likes to remind us, the good news is that people have never had so many tools at their fingertips—tools that are getting better, faster, and cheaper with every passing day. So, sure, it’s possible that some older jobs might not be needed any more, but with the nature of the tools at our disposal, we’ve never been better placed to create newer and better ones for ourselves.
The Future of Work
Four years ago, a tiny virus wreaked havoc across the globe, changing the course of human history forever. It was a black swan that ushered in many new trends, but also dramatically accelerated a number of old ones that were already well underway.
One such trend was our relationship with work.
In January of 2020, after reading Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek, I asked my boss if there was any chance I could work from home one day a week—just one.
The answer was no: ‘the rules’ didn’t allow it.
Two months later, almost everyone in the company was working from home every day of the week. The next couple of years, from late 2020 to 2022, would mark a historic bending of ‘the rules,’ as workers around the world either resigned or reinvented their professional lives. The labor market went bonkers, as did the investment market. People were buying JPEGs of rocks for a million dollars. Anything was possible.
2023 into 2024 has marked the return of the status quo—but not entirely. Work has changed, and will continue to change. Many workers have returned to the office, but not all of them. Many attitudes toward ‘work-life balance’ will never return to their pre-pandemic state. To say nothing about the civilization-shifting effects of AI on the horizon.
To understand the future of work, however, we must first understand the past. We must go back and, like a river, find the origins of the trends around us—not only to see where we are, but to see where we’re going.
The History of Work
Modern work is an anomaly in the annals of history.
The earliest form of work was that of the hunter-gatherer: individuals working in small tribes hunting and foraging for food. Research tells us that most hunter-gatherer tribes worked less than 20 hours a week, spending the rest of their time at leisure.
With the discovery of farming, it soon became possible to sustain many people in the same place. And so, we transitioned to an agrarian society, where people no longer had to constantly move and ‘commute’ for work, but could instead settle down and provide (i.e. farm) for themselves. This was the original work-from-home. In medieval times, carpenters, blacksmiths, butchers, and numerous other professions emerged as extensions of ‘the home office.’ With the arrival of the Industrial Age, however, ushered in by the steam engine, workers everywhere began to migrate from the home to the factory, then the home to the office—a trend that continued right up until the last 30 years or so.
With the arrival of the Internet, however, a new age is upon us: the Information Age—and in the words of Naval Ravikant, “the information age will reverse the industrial age.”
Here’s how we think it could happen.
1. The Rise of Work-From-Home
The Internet has been promising us telecommuting for decades now. It only took a virus that killed millions of people and forced the world into isolation for that promise to start shaping up.
We now have all the tools and acronyms (VR, AR, AI) to make remote work seamless—and many employees and employers are seizing the opportunity. Employees simply not having to waste hours commuting twice a day is often a game-changer on both a personal and a professional level. Employers, meanwhile, aside from saving vast amounts of capital on office space, can avail themselves of the best talent globally. Talk about a competitive advantage.
OSV is a testament to that. Our entire team is entirely remote. Aside from a few meetings, we work mostly async—this very magazine is written, designed, and produced across three different continents and at least six different time-zones.
Of course, nothing beats in-person collaboration for spurring ideas and innovation, but the flexibility of working remotely is proving hard to match—which brings us to the second big trend.
Geographical Competition for Talent
The obvious knock-on effect of working from home is that people no longer need to live near their work. Some might choose to live closer to family, some might choose to leave the bustle of the city, others might choose to become ‘nomads’ for a while.
Countries and states already compete for corporations—there is a reason so many US companies choose Ireland as their European base, and that 60% of Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware—but now, with the rise of remote work, perhaps both countries and corporations will have to start really competing for skilled workers on a global scale.
2. Reduced size of firms
In the US, from 1994 to 2019, the number of new startups rose sharply, but the job gains from these companies fell—so even though new startups have 90 percent of job growth, older firms still have 86 percent of total employment. But why?
Ronald Coase, in his essay, “The Nature of the Firm”, talks about why companies are the size they are. People begin to organize their production inside firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm. Today, however, our new fleet of revolutionary technologies are reducing transaction costs at an unprecedented rate.
The Fall of Transaction Costs
Payment processors handle payments, so no need to build a payment system in-house; cloud providers provide hosting and other services, so no need to have server hosting in-house; AI firms provide models-as-a-service, so no need to spend millions training your own.
Critical functionality must still be taken care of in-house, of course, but everything noncritical can be outsourced to companies that can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Moreover, these external transaction costs are only beginning to fall—better will become even better; faster, even faster; cheaper, even cheaper.
We’re already seeing the rise of solopreneurs who make millions with few to no employees. @levelsio makes millions a year working alone, and @justinwelsh has crossed $5M in revenue from his one-person company in less than four years.
The Rise of Fractional Jobs
Alongside the rise of individuals working for themselves, we’re also seeing an emerging wave of people having multiple jobs. The subreddit r/overemployed has plenty of examples of people working multiple jobs: some out of necessity, many simply because they can maximize earnings.
Working from home, with no set schedule, has given people unprecedented flexibility with their time. At OSV, for example, we have a mixture of full-time and part-time team members, who—thanks to the freedom of working async—also have time to spare for non-OSV projects, personal and professional. Gumroad is another great example of people working a set number of hours and spending the rest of their time however they choose!
We may see more employers embracing this, whether they like it or not—for the recent wave of new technologies is threatening to upend the world of work as we know it.
3. AI goes mainstream
In 2022, artificial intelligence went mainstream.
While research in the space has been underway for decades, the release of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion catapulted AI into the limelight. And rightly so, generating a realistic image with just a text prompt was a paradigm-shifting innovation.
But the real push came in November of 2022, the month that marked the release of ChatGPT. Excluding Meta’s Threads, ChatGPT is the fastest product ever to reach 100m users, crossing the line less than two months after launch.
If trends continue, AI will likely unlock a productivity boost unlike anything we’ve ever seen. As with any new technology, of course, there are concerns about its potential negative impact on existing jobs. OpenAI itself came out with a list of the highest-paid jobs most at risk.
As pointed out in the Financial Times, however, AI uplifts the performance of those who use it—especially low performers. The ones who fared best were cyborgs or centaurs: humans that used AI as an extension of themselves, not a replacement.
When the automobile went mainstream, horse carriages went out of business. The world’s coachmen didn’t just disappear, however. We got taxi drivers. When the camera was invented, the demand for portrait artists fell, but new forms of art quickly emerged to fill the space. We got photographers.
Humanity has survived innumerable changes in its environment, and those who thrive are invariably the ones most open to change itself. With AI, unpredictable as it is, the chances are pretty high that some branches of knowledge work will be impacted pretty drastically. For some, the transition period will be smooth; for others, not so easy.
But, as Jim likes to remind us, the good news is that people have never had so many tools at their fingertips—tools that are getting better, faster, and cheaper with every passing day. So, sure, it’s possible that some older jobs might not be needed any more, but with the nature of the tools at our disposal, we’ve never been better placed to create newer and better ones for ourselves.
The Future of Work
Four years ago, a tiny virus wreaked havoc across the globe, changing the course of human history forever. It was a black swan that ushered in many new trends, but also dramatically accelerated a number of old ones that were already well underway.
One such trend was our relationship with work.
In January of 2020, after reading Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek, I asked my boss if there was any chance I could work from home one day a week—just one.
The answer was no: ‘the rules’ didn’t allow it.
Two months later, almost everyone in the company was working from home every day of the week. The next couple of years, from late 2020 to 2022, would mark a historic bending of ‘the rules,’ as workers around the world either resigned or reinvented their professional lives. The labor market went bonkers, as did the investment market. People were buying JPEGs of rocks for a million dollars. Anything was possible.
2023 into 2024 has marked the return of the status quo—but not entirely. Work has changed, and will continue to change. Many workers have returned to the office, but not all of them. Many attitudes toward ‘work-life balance’ will never return to their pre-pandemic state. To say nothing about the civilization-shifting effects of AI on the horizon.
To understand the future of work, however, we must first understand the past. We must go back and, like a river, find the origins of the trends around us—not only to see where we are, but to see where we’re going.
The History of Work
Modern work is an anomaly in the annals of history.
The earliest form of work was that of the hunter-gatherer: individuals working in small tribes hunting and foraging for food. Research tells us that most hunter-gatherer tribes worked less than 20 hours a week, spending the rest of their time at leisure.
With the discovery of farming, it soon became possible to sustain many people in the same place. And so, we transitioned to an agrarian society, where people no longer had to constantly move and ‘commute’ for work, but could instead settle down and provide (i.e. farm) for themselves. This was the original work-from-home. In medieval times, carpenters, blacksmiths, butchers, and numerous other professions emerged as extensions of ‘the home office.’ With the arrival of the Industrial Age, however, ushered in by the steam engine, workers everywhere began to migrate from the home to the factory, then the home to the office—a trend that continued right up until the last 30 years or so.
With the arrival of the Internet, however, a new age is upon us: the Information Age—and in the words of Naval Ravikant, “the information age will reverse the industrial age.”
Here’s how we think it could happen.
1. The Rise of Work-From-Home
The Internet has been promising us telecommuting for decades now. It only took a virus that killed millions of people and forced the world into isolation for that promise to start shaping up.
We now have all the tools and acronyms (VR, AR, AI) to make remote work seamless—and many employees and employers are seizing the opportunity. Employees simply not having to waste hours commuting twice a day is often a game-changer on both a personal and a professional level. Employers, meanwhile, aside from saving vast amounts of capital on office space, can avail themselves of the best talent globally. Talk about a competitive advantage.
OSV is a testament to that. Our entire team is entirely remote. Aside from a few meetings, we work mostly async—this very magazine is written, designed, and produced across three different continents and at least six different time-zones.
Of course, nothing beats in-person collaboration for spurring ideas and innovation, but the flexibility of working remotely is proving hard to match—which brings us to the second big trend.
Geographical Competition for Talent
The obvious knock-on effect of working from home is that people no longer need to live near their work. Some might choose to live closer to family, some might choose to leave the bustle of the city, others might choose to become ‘nomads’ for a while.
Countries and states already compete for corporations—there is a reason so many US companies choose Ireland as their European base, and that 60% of Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware—but now, with the rise of remote work, perhaps both countries and corporations will have to start really competing for skilled workers on a global scale.
2. Reduced size of firms
In the US, from 1994 to 2019, the number of new startups rose sharply, but the job gains from these companies fell—so even though new startups have 90 percent of job growth, older firms still have 86 percent of total employment. But why?
Ronald Coase, in his essay, “The Nature of the Firm”, talks about why companies are the size they are. People begin to organize their production inside firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm. Today, however, our new fleet of revolutionary technologies are reducing transaction costs at an unprecedented rate.
The Fall of Transaction Costs
Payment processors handle payments, so no need to build a payment system in-house; cloud providers provide hosting and other services, so no need to have server hosting in-house; AI firms provide models-as-a-service, so no need to spend millions training your own.
Critical functionality must still be taken care of in-house, of course, but everything noncritical can be outsourced to companies that can do it better, faster, and cheaper. Moreover, these external transaction costs are only beginning to fall—better will become even better; faster, even faster; cheaper, even cheaper.
We’re already seeing the rise of solopreneurs who make millions with few to no employees. @levelsio makes millions a year working alone, and @justinwelsh has crossed $5M in revenue from his one-person company in less than four years.
The Rise of Fractional Jobs
Alongside the rise of individuals working for themselves, we’re also seeing an emerging wave of people having multiple jobs. The subreddit r/overemployed has plenty of examples of people working multiple jobs: some out of necessity, many simply because they can maximize earnings.
Working from home, with no set schedule, has given people unprecedented flexibility with their time. At OSV, for example, we have a mixture of full-time and part-time team members, who—thanks to the freedom of working async—also have time to spare for non-OSV projects, personal and professional. Gumroad is another great example of people working a set number of hours and spending the rest of their time however they choose!
We may see more employers embracing this, whether they like it or not—for the recent wave of new technologies is threatening to upend the world of work as we know it.
3. AI goes mainstream
In 2022, artificial intelligence went mainstream.
While research in the space has been underway for decades, the release of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion catapulted AI into the limelight. And rightly so, generating a realistic image with just a text prompt was a paradigm-shifting innovation.
But the real push came in November of 2022, the month that marked the release of ChatGPT. Excluding Meta’s Threads, ChatGPT is the fastest product ever to reach 100m users, crossing the line less than two months after launch.
If trends continue, AI will likely unlock a productivity boost unlike anything we’ve ever seen. As with any new technology, of course, there are concerns about its potential negative impact on existing jobs. OpenAI itself came out with a list of the highest-paid jobs most at risk.
As pointed out in the Financial Times, however, AI uplifts the performance of those who use it—especially low performers. The ones who fared best were cyborgs or centaurs: humans that used AI as an extension of themselves, not a replacement.
When the automobile went mainstream, horse carriages went out of business. The world’s coachmen didn’t just disappear, however. We got taxi drivers. When the camera was invented, the demand for portrait artists fell, but new forms of art quickly emerged to fill the space. We got photographers.
Humanity has survived innumerable changes in its environment, and those who thrive are invariably the ones most open to change itself. With AI, unpredictable as it is, the chances are pretty high that some branches of knowledge work will be impacted pretty drastically. For some, the transition period will be smooth; for others, not so easy.
But, as Jim likes to remind us, the good news is that people have never had so many tools at their fingertips—tools that are getting better, faster, and cheaper with every passing day. So, sure, it’s possible that some older jobs might not be needed any more, but with the nature of the tools at our disposal, we’ve never been better placed to create newer and better ones for ourselves.
