The Death of the Day Job.

Picture this.

The year is 2034, and traditional 9-5 jobs are dead.

Everyone is their own boss, running their own business.

According to the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, this is where the economy is going.

This past week I came across a Twitter thread summarizing his thoughts on the Gig Economy, and it stopped me in my tracks.

It speculates within the next decade, 50% of the US workforce will be freelancers.

The average white-collar employee will work remote, spend less hours on the job, AND be 200% more productive.

How is this possible?

It’s a combination of AI-enablement, hyper-specialization, and globalization all at the same time.

See, just over the past few years it’s already begun to take off. People are outsourcing the mundane, repetitive, low-ROI parts of their jobs to AI agents or specialists overseas en masse to focus more of their time on their most critical tasks.

Remote work after COVID + AI augmentation after Chat-GPT have radically changed the way business gets done in just the past 4 years. What happens when you extrapolate out another 10 years?

Pretty soon you’ll be able to cut out and externalize pretty much every non-critical part of your job, freeing you up to spend ALL your time on the one or two specialized task that you are best at.

AI infrastructure, gig-economy marketplaces, social networks, global workforces will enable most companies to minimize op-ex and focus on what they’re good at. Many companies will be able to get by as 1-person operations. I speculate that we will see the first $1B 1-person company this decade.

AI tools and solopreneurs; Call it the agent-economy.

So what does this mean for each of us now? How can we prepare for a world on the path towards freelancer domination?

It heightens the importance of a few big things:

• Building a personal brand (your profile will be your new resume)

• Plugging in to the right online communities (connect in the right niches)

• Getting familiar with AI tools and global workforce (arbitrage op-ex)

The people who learn to become niche creators that leverage AI tools and global workforce will undoubtedly have the most leverage in the brave new agent-economy.

Because they will have the lowest costs, the most flexibility, the greatest reach with the strongest connections.

They will have the most agency to bend reality to their will.

Ultimately what business and artistry really is. Deriving value by exacting control over your own domain.

Food for thought.