In the last month, I’ve been inundated with AI takes — how it’s game-changing, how mass layoffs are coming, and how the divide between those who use it and those who don’t is going to be enormous.
“Agentic AI will change the world. A revolution is coming. Unemployment en masse is inevitable.“
In essence, the message is “if you aren’t using AI, you will be left behind.”
And there is absolutely no doubt that the technology is getting better rapidly, and it will change the world.
Even just today, Anthropic unveiled new AI tools “designed to automate tasks in HR, investment banking, and design.”
I spun up Claude Copilot to check it out and had the tool run a full SEO audit of AccidentallyRetired.com, and it was very comprehensive and impressive.
I once paid $10,000 for a fully comprehensive forensic SEO Audit, and what I received in 10 minutes from Claude Copilot was at least 90% as good – and I am sure could be refined further with better instructions.
So yeah, AI is getting better every day, and we should all be equally wowed and scared.
As Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote in his sobering essay,
“New technologies often bring labor market shocks, and in the past humans have always recovered from them, but I am concerned that this is because these previous shocks affected only a small fraction of the full possible range of human abilities, leaving room for humans to expand to new tasks. AI will have effects that are much broader and occur much faster, and therefore I worry it will be much more challenging to make things work out well.”
– The Adolescence of Technology
And that really is the scare…society and humanity are not prepared for exponential job loss.
We have no idea what is coming, and even Dario offered few solutions or ideas that weren’t vague or pie in the sky.
So I think X is rightly so both very optimistic about the technology and scared as hell at the same time.
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When I was building my businesses in the past, I relied on human cooperation, and ultimately, what I got really good at was overcoming human-based obstacles.
Part of the fun of building a business was getting someone to work for free or to help contribute to something before I had any resources.
Figuring out the right person to hire for the right motivations and the right price.
Engaging in a meaningful dialogue about work or just generally shooting the shit brought enjoyment and fulfillment to my life.
Not to mention the ability to employ people and provide them with more opportunities than they previously had.
Only now, none of that is even needed to start.
If you have an idea these days, you can literally head to your favorite generative AI and have a go at it.
Projects that would have taken years in the past are now done in days, hours, or minutes.
The tech world is freaking the eff out too.
Because they all believe this is a game-changer.
Instead of having to deal with humans, now they can simply hire out AI for tokens.
Only, I think working with humans was the point entirely.
Being in something together and trying to figure out how to overcome obstacles or build something from nothing.
Now you don’t even need a human to brainstorm or provide superior output.
You don’t need a lawyer to do the legal paperwork.
You don’t need a software engineer to build an app for you.
You can do this all with a few prompts, and while not perfect, it certainly can get the job done.
The biggest question in any business is what is the ONE thing that moves the needle, that makes the difference, that drives profit?
What is the differentiator? Is it your strategy, your distribution, your pricing, your product itself, or your sales?
When software, legal, marketing, and PR all become commoditized, well, what then?
I’m not really sure, but I also am not really sure that we all want to be running AI-centric businesses.
We want to be in the business of serving people.
But here’s the thing — I’m not ready to give up on what’s possible either.
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Today, I had Claude build me a custom snowboarding game, called “Shred it” in a similar fashion to the old SkiFree game that we used to play on Microsoft computers in the 90s, and it took about 5 mins. Just 5 minutes! The game is here btw (shred away):
Now with AI, you can spin up websites on the fly, use it to analyze spreadsheet data, build custom reports, prepare social media posts – really anything you imagine an AI will be able to do pretty dang soon.
I can easily see the tools getting so good that everything I typically outsource or used to do myself manually can now be automated away.
Except that something interesting happens when you automate a process, it gives you the human time to work on other tasks and try out other distribution methods previously not being chased.
The more you automate, the more you free up your creativity to attack bigger, more innovative activities – and this is something Dario also brought up in his essay.
In fact, it is entirely possible that AI automation isn’t going to take away entry-level jobs and work, but allow us to create more.
I saw someone write the other day that since the iPhone and Android phones started to bake in better and better cameras, making us all photographers, you would think that photographers would be a bygone pastime.
In fact, photographers didn’t disappear — the industry has continued to grow and find new niches like drone photography, e-commerce, and personal branding, even as smartphones put a camera in everyone’s pocket.
The demand for photography has gone up, and the baseline skills perhaps have gone down, as anyone can now be a photographer, but not everyone knows how to properly master a composition, nor does everyone want to learn.
Now, of course, it won’t play out this way as AI automation will kill off many jobs; it’s not going to be easy, but I do hope that it will allow knowledge workers of all kinds to get more creative and solve bigger and better problems.
Businesses should not forget the human element, because humans drive the economy.
So I think the question in the end is, can we solve even bigger problems for humanity?
Can we use this tool, this commoditizing of nearly everything, to find ways to solve humanity’s biggest problems?
Can we solve the energy crisis?
Can we solve climate change?
Can we solve becoming multi-planetary?
Can we solve poverty?
Can we cure cancer?
If we can’t solve these problems, then we aren’t actually moving forward.
So in the end, is AI a bubble, hype, or a revolution? I think the answer is all of the above.
AI is commoditizing pretty much all knowledge working jobs, but as we saw in the photographer example, that doesn’t mean that the demand for that job will necessarily go down.
AI could very likely create more jobs than it takes away, which would be both surprising and yet satisfying.
So if you aren’t using AI, are you going to be left behind?
I’d argue the real divide isn’t who uses AI vs who doesn’t, but who uses it to solve something that actually matters.
There will be new creativity born out of AI and also incredible abuse.
We will all be able to tell beautiful stories through art
Think about all the spam and scams you got with the invention of email. Imagine where it will go with AI. Its already hard to now what is the truth from all the spin and the avalanche of information.
For sure. It’s so hard to know what the economic impacts will be, but I do think that it will be a net positive.
There are certainly some real short-term dangers out there, and of course more spam will prolliferate, deep fakes, and all that, but we can also now tackle bigger and bigger problems.