This week is once again themed around AI and how it will impact entrepreneurs. Specifically, this is about the less obvious but still enormous secondary impacts of AI acceleration.
The new printing press
When you take something that was previously very expensive and make it very cheap and quick, it doesn’t just make the work more efficient. It also makes entirely new kinds of work possible. If the thing being automated is important enough, it can change the world completely.
For example, the printing press might have seemed like a humble invention at the time: just get books copied faster. There were books before, there are books now, just more of them. Not such a big deal. Which is probably why it took a couple of centuries before governments took notice and realised they needed to regulate this stuff. By this time, it was far too late.
The printing press didn’t just lead to monks (the main producers of book copies before that invention) getting books copied more efficiently (or rather, losing their jobs). It radically changed the nature of the book as a mechanism for diffusing ideas around the world, democratising it and exploding its usefulness. This deafening impact echoed around the world, breaking up the Catholic Church (once people could read translations of the Bible for themselves), toppling governments (once people could share subversive ideas more effectively), speeding up scientific development (through sharing of important texts), and accelerating the spread of disruptive ideas.
It is no coincidence that the scientific revolution began a century after the printing press came into use. Had the governments of Strassburg and Mainz understood the impact that Gutenberg’s invention would have, they would probably have arrested him on the spot. Had the Church had the slightest inkling as to what “copying books faster and cheaper” meant in the long run, he would have been burned at the stake immediately and his satanic invention locked away.
But they didn’t. Most people are resistant to seeing even primary effects, let alone secondary and tertiary impacts.
As I mentioned last week, AI is going to radically speed up the work that most people do (usually by automating all or most of it). But this won’t just make running businesses more efficient. Sure, even more people will be able to build and scale substantial startups with only a handful of people. But that’s just the obvious stuff, the primary impact.
What’s a lot harder to predict, and probably far more impactful, is what new kinds of behaviour will emerge from all this acceleration. Whose church is about to be broken up by some unintended side-effect of this acceleration? What government will fall?
Landing page proliferation
Let’s look at a simple, practical example, while remembering that there are countless others - billions, literally, as the AIs being developed can do pretty much any kind of knowledge work better and faster, and knowledge work is infinite in its variations.
Even this trivial example could have extraordinary consequences.
It is now possible to create a professional looking landing page for a new business, complete with blog posts, graphics, content, and everything, in a few seconds. Once upon a time, this required a skilled programmer, a designer, writer, and a decent budget to pay them. Even a couple of years ago this would still have taken most people at least a couple days to do properly. Now it takes seconds, or perhaps minutes for a complex website with a lot of content.
Does this new ability to create landing pages in seconds enable new types of behaviours? Well, one use of landing pages is that, at the moment, they are a “credential” that various organisations use to recognise other legitimate organisations. For example, banks still use the website of a company as a way to validate its seriousness. If you try to open an account for your business, they will ask for the URL, have a look, and if they see the word “crypto” anywhere, deny you service. This verification process is now utterly obsolete. Unique, believable business websites are basically free and instant.
So it probably nullifies a bunch of “social proof” algorithms.
Let’s go deeper. Can this be exploited in some way? Because if it can, it will be.
What’s the worst thing that someone could do with the ability to generate infinite business websites for very cheap? What’s the best thing?
Here’s a thought: For decades, people have practiced the art of creating products (often very bland ebooks) with sales pages, and using SEO to drive traffic, convert, and make a profit. They’ve used tools like A/B testing extensively to do so, optimising everything from the ad copy to the words on the CTA buttons.
Everything that those people have been doing can be automated by the AIs we have right now - let alone what we’ll have by the end of the year. It can be done over and over and over again for nearly free, on every topic imaginable, ad nauseam.
I imagine we’re not very far from an explosion of such “businesses” as the internet gets drowned in an ocean of AI-generated ebooks and videos being sold on AI-generated websites with AI-generated ad campaigns, with the AIs doing everything from coming up with ideas to testing, iterating, evolving, etc.
This is a secondary impact of the ability to generate credible websites easily.
What about tertiary impacts? How does this change the world we live in? What business models does it shut down? What new opportunities does it create?
When the internet becomes flooded with well-marketed garbage content, what happens then? What if the AI-generated content ends up being better than the human-written content in most cases? I won’t even try to predict the tertiary effects, because that’s my point: they are impossible to predict. There are too many variables at play still. But they will come into view as time passes, for those who are looking and thinking.
And this is just one really basic example of making professional websites cheap and quick. Each individual thing that is being sped up might lead to more emergent innovations, when what was previously expensive and time-consuming becomes cheap and instant.
Burning churches as far as the eye can see.
What to make of this
What is an entrepreneur? Fundamentally, one useful definition is that entrepreneurs are people who spot commercial opportunities and execute on them.
These new emergent possibilities each have the potential to be exploited commercially, at least for a time. That time may, in fact, not be very long, so there will be a premium on speed. Can the AI help you spot the emergent behaviour that arises as a secondary effect from AI automation? Probably.
As an entrepreneur, if you want to play this game, you should be on the lookout for these kinds of new models that will become visible as things speed up. You’ll need to be riding the bleeding edge of AI developments, up to date on the latest possibilities opened up by whatever is being developed now, and ready to pounce.
Being the first one to seize on one of those could make you very wealthy… at least as long as wealth makes a difference.
Which I’ll talk about in next week’s newsletter!
The Weekly Update
This week, you may want to feast your eyes on a new article I published on Monday, about how to do customer validation. Maybe I should have subtitled it “until the AI just does all that for you a million times faster and cheaper”.
There is also an Investibles update, as every week, of course, which is also related to customer validation.
That’s it for today. Enjoy the rest of your week!
Daniel