Next, I’d like to talk about my third point, but it’s something that’s difficult to convey. In order to explain it, first we need to talk about the history and future of humanity. I know we’re exploring the big questions all of a sudden, but stay with me!

In primitive times, the whole day was spent just searching for food. As they showed us in the comic First Human Giatrus, capturing a mammoth and storing it for later provided about as much entertainment for people back then as we get going out for drinks today. Of course, many murals were left behind from that era. A person’s day was the same then as it is now, but my third point can be found in how things have changed with the flow of time.

A variety of technological changes in the past have shaped human history. What came first, the tangible or the intangible? When a technological innovation first occurs, it is thought to be something tangible from which the intangible is born. The agricultural revolution stabilized food supplies, the industrial revolution brought about mass production, and these created a stable living environment. And now, as chance would have it, we live in the middle of the internet revolution.
I’m now 53, so for about half of my professional life, we didn’t have computers at work. How did we manage to get anything done back then? Well, actually, productivity hasn’t changed much between then and now. It isn’t as if Japan’s GDP doubled after the internet entered our lives. In Japan’s case, the GDP has actually gone down. Even though things became convenient and efficient with the internet, productivity hasn’t really increased. I think the issue nowadays is a lack of change due to a reduction in productivity in another way, a lack of productivity due to overwork. So how do we utilize the progress of these new technologies? That’s the point I would like us all to think about today.

To look at it in concrete numbers, let’s look at the USA around the time of the agricultural revolution, in the year 1800. At that time, about 90% of North Americans were farmers. According to Jerry Kaplan, a teacher at Stanford, the exact number is 87%, but either way, by the time we reached the year 2000, that number had fallen to 1.7%. All those farmers didn’t lose their jobs suddenly, the jobs disappeared over the course of 200 years. In other words, there was a shift to other jobs.
When we look back at various innovations, highways, bullet trains and planes are all the same. As we moved into an era of convenient travel, the scenery and communities along the way were lost. Streets lined with nothing but shuttered stores were one of the negative outcomes of industrialization. They say brick and mortar shopping is going to die due to Amazon, but maybe what we need to think about instead is the next innovation. Change simply happens. That’s the premise I wanted to share with you, that the history of change is neither good nor bad in and of itself.