It's a new world...

The world as we have read has moved through various ages over it’s history. There was the Stone Age with the caveman who used to hunt animals and gather food for survival - it was also the “Hunter-Gatherer Age”. It lasted for tens of thousands of years - perhaps millions. The pace of change in the world was extremely slow and things remained the same for generations upon generations of humans. 

But there was growth and man moved to the “Agriculture Age” where he started settling down and adopted tools and land for farming and subsequently trading and exchange of goods. Division of labor set in slowly and there was a time many centuries back when there other socially useful trades came up. The son learnt the trade from the father and it got handed down the generations. A farmer’s son was a farmer and a potter’s son a potter. Accumulated knowledge and an ecosystem which was already established helped in moving further from where the father left it. This lasted tens of thousands of years or more perhaps. 

Enter the “Industrial Age” and jobs were created for the first time - organised labor increased the productivity of the world and it seemed like the perfect way forward for the world. Factories, jobs, training, education has served us for over 300 years. But if you notice, the speed of change increased and the span of stability decreased. In our memories we saw the transition from the Industrial Age to the “Information Age”. A time when machines and factories and capital assets started being valued lesser than the Information that you owned and could distribute. This age is not older than 50 years at most. Millions of years to tens of thousands of years to hundreds of years to 50 years give and take…and we have started hearing of Artificial Intelligence which can start self organising the knowledge around us as well. Blockchain removes the need to verify and validate to a large extent. 

I am of the opinion that we are moving into a new age which I call the “Imagination Age”. An age where you are only limited by your Imagination and if you don’t have one, you are the cursed one. It’s an era where unlimited resources are at our disposal for doing anything that we can imagine. But imagine we must. That is something that cannot be delegated, nor automated, nor process driven. The only way to survive in this age is to believe. To believe that “whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve”. You don’t need a factory to produce, you can prototype and try. You don’t need huge budgets to market, you can use the power of social. You don’t need to run from bank to bank for funds, you can simply crowdfund. You don’t need a conference room and a an expensive conferencing system, Skype and Zoom and FaceTime are accessible to every common man. You don’t need a store monopoly but can do with a web front that anyone can make. The only thing you need is Imagination…the power to imagine what is it you will use these free resources for.