The industrial revolution allowed many to dream and realise those dreams through an exponential increase in productivity. This ability allowed those many to taste, smell and feel growth.

The entrepreneurial spirit, arguably a Protestant ethic, was redefined in a way which Europe's estate owners could not ever understand. We refer to their descendants today as the WASP and the euro trash; they still have the estates but not the funds to renovate them.

According to businessdictionary.com, Knowledge Economy is an "[e]conomy based on creating, evaluating, and trading knowledge. In a knowledge economy, labour costs become progressively less important and traditional economic concepts such as scarcity of resources and economies of scale cease to apply".

This means that fixed assets are now secondary to the equity of our ideas i.e. with the global flow of capital and the rise in the functionality and innovation of technology, ideas are now more valuable than capital.

In this new century, many more ideas will be explored, tested and executed because costs will increasingly decrease. This will be due to the end of the company as we know it. Everyone will become a freelancing executive.

A seamless network of freelancers will lead to this. They will all be available and have areas of focus and others of interest. By the time generations X and Y retire and generation Z are adults, it will become silly to hire law firms as opposed to freelancing lawyers, management consultancies as opposed to freelancing consultants, ad agencies as opposed to freelancing mad men.

It will become silly because there will be a viral realisation that paying companies as opposed to individuals basically means paying their office rent and their administration (HR, finance and marketing) salaries.

Like the determinately proud soldiers of the Ottoman empire who refused to fight rifled Europeans with anything but their swords, some companies will attempt to resist.

Relic of the past

Alas, like the now proven to have failed strategy of publications charging for content online, the company too will become a relic of the past; and with it the organisation chart; the function of accounting will be automated, personal and networking websites will replace marketing, and functional and well-designed job networks will spell the end of HR.

The knowledge economy will herald the end of the secretary and the rise of the assistant who will be the freelancing executive's sidekick and punch; the assistant prepares proposals, screens contact lists for collaborations and grabs the skinny latte.

The assistant is as ambitious as the executive and works for him for an average of 27 months before moving on and starting to take on freelance jobs; it is an apprenticeship. The executive was once an apprentice of an executive who was once an apprentice of another executive and it goes on.

Experience is still important but is now triangularly balanced by skill and knowledge; together, freelancers attempt, fail and succeed more easily. There is much more of all of that. The world has more colours than an artist could dot a canvas with and it's all good.

The role of government in the knowledge economy changes to one of coordination and facilitation. Taxes will be lowered as ‘neighboards'— neighbourhood boards, take on a more leading role in investing directly in spaces of direct relevance.

If an area falls into demise it is deemed evolutionary and its less fortunate inhabitants move to more affluent areas and contribute to their growth. It is not the end of romance, but rather the suicide of nostalgia and rise of the objective romantics.

In this new century, the O'Reillys, Stewarts and Sawyers will not work for Fox, CNN and ABC. They will prepare their show with their apprentices, work with freelancing sound and video technicians in a rented studio which will probably be owned by one of the media conglomerates' debtors they would all cease to exist by then and stream on their own online channel on YouTube or whatever it is that will have taken over YouTube by then.

In this new century, banking services are largely automated since money is now fully electronic. With the cost of equity drastically decreased as the cost of the innovation having balanced it out, debt has become the secondary funding instrument of choice; corporate banking is a niche business focused mostly on overdraft services and import/export related letters of credit.

There are no investment banks; the idea of paying two to five per cent of transaction value to what is essentially a broker is heresy. Instead, there are corporate finance freelancers who perform the valuation exercise.

Equity is then raised online through specialised E2I (entrepreneur to investor) sites with no minimum commitment and the road show is a live video investor conference. Everyone has access to capital and everyone has access to ideas. Value adding venture capitalists are the only financial firms that may survive in this landscape.

The question is not whether you're going to migrate from the mindset of a competitive revolutionary industrialist to that of fluid collaborative knowledge economy freelancers, but rather how fast; this change is both good and inevitable.

- Mishaal Al Gergawi is an Emirati commentator on socio-economic and cultural affairs in the UAE.