Thanks to the good offices of Metacool, I’m in one of IDEO’s ridiculously hip offices, listening to Daniel Pink talk about his new book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

I’m the least cool person here by a couple standard deviations. (But that’s usually the case.)

The event starts with a little light banter.

Diego: “It’s a really great book, because it’s about us.”

Daniel: “Talking here is such a case of preaching to the saved….

“Good speeches have three things: brevity, levity, and repetition. Let me say that again: brevity, levity, and repetition.”

The big idea: Established professions used to define the abilities that really mattered in the world- quantitative ability, analytical skill, and other logical, linear, sequential skills. Now, though, a new set of skills- artistry, empathy, and other synthetic, holistic abilities- is becoming more valuable, and will be more important in the future. You’ll still need the former; but they’ll be necessary, not sufficient.

Why? Three things. Abundance, Asia, Automation.

Abundance: “We live in a spectacularly wealthy society,” one unprecedented in human history. We have more cars in America than drivers’ licenses; the self-storage industry is now a $17 billion business- bigger than Hollywood. You can no longer sell products that are merely utilitarian; you have to create things that appeal to higher needs or desires. This is why you have Michael Graves toilet brushes and teakettles, and why places like IDEO exist.

“The abundance gap.” Incomes have risen dramatically since 1950, but satisfaction has stayed the same; that’s the abundance gap. (When Steve Case puts $500 million into wellness, he’s aiming at that gap.)

Asia: 10% of jobs in IT will move overseas by 2006; 25% will offshore by 2010. This is one of those phenomena that’s massively over-hyped in the short term, but massively under-hyped in the long term: India and China have a very long way to go before they’re serious competitors to the U.S., but they’re very big countries. However, India will be the biggest English-speaking country by 2010; its elites are well-trained; and are connected to America and Europe through essentially free telecom networks.

Consequently, more routizined kinds of intellectual work are going to move in the next decade: everything from software to financial services to medical analysis will be offshored.

Automation: The advance of chess-playing programs are an indicator of how skilled intellectual work can and will be automated.In the legal world, for example, agreements like uncontested divorces, wills, landlord-tenant agreements, and the like have been automated; accounting is being squeezed by TurboTax and $500/month Indian chartered accountants.

Together, the collective force of these is nudging us from one set of abilities to another: from the Information Age (dominated by knowledge workers) to the Conceptual Age (dominated by creators and empathizers). We already moved from economies in which muscle was critical, to one in which manual dexterity mattered, to one in which the left brain mattered, to one dominated by the right brain.

What Matters. There are six abilities that will matter most in the future.

1. Not just function, but also design. GM’s Bob Lutz talks about cars as “entertainment and mobile sculpture,” not just transportation; and GM is hardly the only big American company to understand the importance of design these day. The 2000 Palm Beach ballot “is the Sputnik of the Conceptual Age,” the object that shows the absolute centrality of design.
2. Not just argument, but also story. Facts are largely ubiquitous and free; what matters is context and good delivery. packaged goods have back-stories (go to a Whole Foods, and you’ll one of four ty).
3. Not just focus, but also symphony. An amazing proportion of self-made entrepreneurs are dyslexic.
4. Not just logic, but also empathy. “You can’t outsource this, you can’t automate it. You just can’t.” There are companies that essentially are in the empathy business.
5. Not just seriousness, but also play. Gamers are familiar with failure, and have done so thousands of time in the course of mastering their games.
6. Not just accumulation, but also meaning. Aging Baby Boomers in particular are thinking deeply about mortality and the meaning of life.

It strikes me that there’s a fourth “A” that could be added to Abundance, Asia, and Automation: Aging. A lot of this talk resonates with Theodore Roszak’s Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become Elders, which is all about how Baby Boomers are transforming- or going to transform- how society thinks about old age, and how elders themselves experience and interpret old age.

For one thing, the countries where we’re seeing the shifts that Pink is talking about are all ones facing big demographic shifts and aging populations.

For another, the kinds of shifts that Pink outlines- from means to meaning, essentially- are ones that Roszak describes as either driven by aging Boomers, as part of their coming to terms with what it means to grow old, or are responses by companies to the demands of a more active generation of elders.

(Update, 1 May 2005: As I’ve subsequently written in an e-mail to Dan, even if aging doesn’t deserve a place as the “fourth A,” it’s worth recognizing that greater abundance and extended life-span are both consequences of first the industrial, and then the information, revolutions. Many of the same technologies and techniques (to use Jacques Ellul’s terms) that have made cheap cars, industrial agriculture, inexpensive clothes, the concept of leisure, and all the other elements of mass consumer culture possible also made possible pharmaceuticals, public health campaigns, social insurance, and the concept of retirement- all elements of the longevity revolution, and which bound our understanding of what it means to get old.)

[To the tune of Röyksopp, “A Higher Place,” from the album “Melody A.M.“.]