The story goes, that when Henry Ford set the price of the original Model T, and the factory workers’ wages, the math came out to about four months of an average salary for the car. The thing is, an entrepreneur makes things because they want to see a different world. In the process, they make money, and so do their employees and associates, who in turn, use that money to buy stuff, including what the entrepreneur makes.
Under this model, entrepreneurship is the tide that lifts all boats. For the investor, it makes sense to put resources into an initiative, because there will be people who will consume the outcome.
There is a lot a of fear these days on what the consequences of more and better AI will be. Will it destroy jobs? Will AI become all the office clerks?, and will robots displace all the factory and warehouse workers, and truck drivers?
Here is the deal: there is A LOT of investment going into AI today. Here is a chart that a good friend published a few days ago:
Those are not peanuts. Those are BILLIONS. So I have a question on this, and if someone knows the answer, I would like to hear it.
If we invest all these resources into AI, we will eventually get to AGI (artificial GENERAL intelligence), the kind that can do pretty much anything that a human can; and if then it replaces all humans in every single job out there, then who the heck is going to buy the stuff that the AI and the robots make? That’s would kill the economy and put us back into feudalism, but even a sensible decline in economic activity will make it really hard to get a return on all this investment.
Our only option is to move higher in the ladder. The real challenge, is that not many of us know how that looks like, just like someone inventing a microprocessor wouldn’t have been able to imagine someone making money on YouTube.
The future is unknown, but in an entrepreneurial society, there is an army of people trying to figure it out.