Agriculture, as already outlined, was the innovation at the heart of the First Disruption, allowing surplus and ever more complex forms of cooperation to transform what it meant to be human. And while one can argue about distinct technological periods within even that – as Peter Drucker and Jeremy Rifkin do – even as recently as the nineteenth century, 60 per cent of the population in countries like Italy and France worked in agriculture. Whether it was the Roman Empire of the first century AD, Europe during Charlemagne or Eastern China under the Song Dynasty a millennium ago, the average person worked in farming, almost always cultivating land which wasn’t theirs.
Today things look rather diferent. Just 4 per cent of Italy’s labour market is in agriculture, while the figure is less than 3 per cent for France, 2 per cent in the UK and 1 per cent in the United States – a nation which leads the world in the production of milk, corn, chicken and beef.
In short, we feed more people more food than ever before with ever fewer people doing the work. While that might sound trivial, as recently as a century ago it would have struck most as entirely implausible.
Similarly, by the beginning of the twenty-first century it was readily apparent that industries central to the Second Disruption – such as iron and steel production, as well as the manufacture of consumer durables like cars and electronic goods – required ever fewer workers to produce ever more output. This trend, an efect of rising productivity, is now observable on a global scale. Even in China, by far the world’s largest exporter of goods, less than a quarter of the labour market works in industry.
The default presumption among economists, at least until recently, was that just as many people ’s work shifted from agriculture to industry something similar would unfold with services. Post-industrial service-based economies would replace those built on manufacturing. To some extent, this was borne out: even China’s service sector grew relative to manufacturing while it became the world’s leading industrial power. In countries like France, Britain and the United States services now comprise 80 per cent of both economic output and jobs.
Full Automation
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