Intelligence and Transcendence
The modern shamans, and the one human act that won't hand off to a machine
As maybe felt by some, we are approaching an inflection point of great magnitude.
Among those affected: jobs, as we know them, are about to change.
This made me think of a parallel: the move from agriculture to industry rhymes with the transformation underway now, from industry to information. I want to offer a perspective on what comes next — and to do that, it helps to look at what already happened once before.
The last great shift was the move from blue-collar to white-collar work: a split between labor force and mind force. It began with almost everyone working with their hands in some way — call it 100% blue-collar — and it has migrated, steadily, toward mind work. The modern corporation is itself a kind of factory now; only the line workers sit at laptops, producing information instead of goods.
The numbers trace the arc:
Around 1900, white-collar work was maybe 15% of the workforce. By 2020, it had grown to something like 70%. In a little over a century, the center of gravity of human work moved from matter to information.
Here is what I find striking. Across that entire transition — and, it seems, across ages and cultures — there appears to be an invariant: roughly 1 in 10 people who are willing to transcend the current norms rather than operate inside them.
In his book Process and Event, two Swedish minds Jan Söderqvist Alexander Bard explore this insight.
They call these people shamans, able to move between different information tribes (socionts) and act as bridges, passing “news” from to one to the other.
It also draws out two intrinsic forces that govern our deepest decisions: the will-to-intelligence — the power of synthesis, of making sense of the past — and the will-to-transcendence — the power of future vision. One force compresses what has been; the other reaches for what could be.
I think the next transformation splits along the same fault line.
The will-to-transcendence
The new shamans — the 1 in 10 — will work beyond intelligence itself. Their task will be to understand the synthesis across cultures and across domains, and then to reason — a distinctly human act — about which path to take.
This is because, the outcome of the intelligence process of syntethizing information is not one path: are multiple paths (maybe infinite) from which a mind has to choose. Through reasoning.
Reasoning about direction is not the same as processing information, and it is precisely the part that does not hand off cleanly to a machine.
The will-to-intelligence
The other layer — the 90% — will be a hybrid world, people and machines together, much like the old factories, synthesizing information to feed the layer above.
The machine does not replace this layer. It joins it.
The model is not changing. Only the deliverable is.
Where we once shipped matter, we will ship thoughts that crystallize in matter automatically.
And everything downstream — manufacturing, agriculture, the physical economy — will continue as the foundational legacy of our earlier eras: still essential, still running, but no longer where the frontier of human work lives.
