when people were ceaselessly around us, talk was cheap, and a manufactured good was a real luxury item...,

NYTimes |  What is going on here? It may be that, in a world rich in digital information, physical contact, and the personal trust and relationship that still comes by spending time with someone, has become even more valuable, since it is harder to come by.

“All aspects of human life are being digitized,” said Geoffrey Moore, an author and consultant to several Silicon Valley companies. “You wonder what that will do to the human mind. For sure, you want to put down some strong personality roots. Companies have to create human communities of supporters, advocates for what the company does.”

That personal advocacy, he says, will matter more than anything an impersonal company can do for itself. There are similar increasing values for human networks of connections: People with taste and experience who know you, people who value you because you have looked at them in that close human way.

Looked at this way, the ever-higher rejection rate of elite colleges despite the increasing popularity of high-quality free online alternatives like Coursera makes perfect sense. People don’t want to be at Stanford; they want the personal relationships they get from being at Stanford. In a fast-changing digital world, that durable human network may in a decade be more valuable than anything a student learned in the classroom.

It is a sharp shift from an earlier time, when people were ceaselessly around us, talk was cheap, and a manufactured good was a real luxury item. When things are digital and can be consumed whenever we want, valuable analog things, perishable in time, become more valuable.

For some technologists, this shift represents a source of hope. The rejiggering of values means that much of the work that currently defines people will go away, but the parts of life that can’t be encoded will become the basis of still-unseen economic activity.

“We’re moving towards a ‘post-automated’ world, where the valuable thing about people will be their emotional content,” said SriSatish Ambati, co-founder and chief executive of 0xdata, a company involved in open source software for big data analysis. “The only way to defeat the machines is if the world, including our brains, has an impossible level of complexity that the machines can never map.”

As the original article accompanying the chart implied, however, the expensive goods of our new world — being authentically seen, being heard in ways that matter — may be increasingly unavailable to the poor. Finding ways to make all that emotional content within humanity, at all levels, into something valuable would be a real economic miracle.