All the riches in the world
In London where I live, I occasionally walk past a graffiti that says “EAT THE RICH”. I find those either amusing or just irritating, depending on my mood, because they seem to miss the point so badly.
I want to grab the person who painted that message (using a can of spray paint made of material that comes from all around the globe, wearing clothes made everywhere except London, and digesting food grown on another continent), shake them and yell at them: “WE’RE ALL RICH!”
Of course, this wealth is not evenly distributed, and it’s totally fair to want to distribute it better… but let’s start by recognising a basic reality: by the standards of humanity throughout history (and even largely by today’s standards, if you compare “the West” to most of the globe), everyone reading this newsletter is unspeakably rich. Obscenely so. It’s truly disgusting how rich we all are. Yes, even those who don’t feel it.
Kings and Emperors could not dream of the wealth that every average Joe is able to enjoy without even thinking about it. This wealth ranges from the everyday to the arcane. Most people in history lived without plumbing, their teeth fell out by the time they were 25, they had little to no access to written knowledge, most faced a real prospect of starving to death in their lifetime, and they could easily die of a small cut on their finger. You are reading this text on a device that would be pure sorcery to anyone who lived a few hundred years ago, with nearly free access to knowledge and power they could not even imagine.
If a mad Emperor had conquered the entire world five hundred years ago and put all its resources to work in the best ways available at the time, they could not even have dreamt of acquiring the wealth that we don’t even notice as part of our modern lives. We are wealthier than everyone who lived before us, and, despite occasional bumps in the road, have only continued to get steadily richer as the decades pass.
We’re all rich.
The AI rocket
So where does AI come into this?
If it doesn’t kill us all, AI is about to raise the average level of wealth so high that within our lifetimes, possibly within just a few years, we today will look about as poor to our future selves as a 15th century monarch looks to us today.
If computers were a bicycle for the mind (as Steve Jobs put it), AI is a rocket, or maybe a rocket-propelled autonomous drone on a mission. It will go fast, and far, and make our previous rate of innovation look quaint. It will come up with new inventions so fast that the rate of innovation will become dizzying even for the most switched-on techies.
What will be the impact that this will have on people’s desires and drives, and what does it means for entrepreneurs?
Technological cornucopia and the hedonic treadmill
Joy and suffering are fickle. When something happens, we experience these feelings, and then they fade.
The same is true for technological marvels. The first time I got an iPhone, it felt like a big deal, and I felt very pleased for a few weeks. But by now, even buying a brand new iPhone makes only a small difference to my life – the joy of that first step change is long forgotten.
Moreover, the biggest boosts in joy don’t come from just getting something you want, but, paradoxically, from getting something you want but can’t quite afford. We are wired to feel even more desire towards things that are just out of our reach, than towards those that we can get just by extending our hand.
This is just how humans work, how their reward systems operate on them. It’s worked well to get us where we are today. Thanks, Evolution!
Now, combine that with a vertiginous rate of innovation, where iPhone level inventions enter the market on a weekly or even daily or hourly basis… How will our desires change when we’re constantly getting more than we imagined possible, faster than we can adapt to it?
Most people will be confused and disoriented. If history is any teacher, large aspects of our current culture will dissolve away in contact with this innovation explosion. Throughout the ages, whenever less technological civilisations have encountered vastly more advanced ones, they have struggled to adapt. We’re about to have that happen to the whole world, by creating a new civilisational paradigm that will be incomprehensible to most alive today.
People will struggle. What about entrepreneurs? Will they be part of the special caste that stays one step ahead of the hurricane?
The end of the entrepreneur
The concept of entrepreneurship is going to be under assault from three directions.
First, there is motivation. In my experience, entrepreneurs have largely been animated by two desires: to improve their financial condition, and to change the world. As the AI-driven world begins to generate more and more wealth, the desire to improve one’s financial condition will start to lose its appeal. If we can all feel like we’ve won the lottery every month or every week… why bother working hard to create a business? Similarly, it’s hard to believe in your mission of “changing the world” when the world is already changing so fast you can barely keep up.
Next, there is competition. When ChatGPT 3.5 was launched and I realised how close we are to AGI, I concluded that most people would be losing their jobs within a few years. At first, however, I thought entrepreneurs would be last in line for this fate. After all, entrepreneurship is so hard, so creative, so multidisciplinary (ego flattery much?)…
I’ve changed my mind about this. Automating entrepreneurship is such a fine prize that we’re first in line. As this unfolds, it might seem like it’s still “entrepreneurs” calling the shots – telling AutoGPT or some later variation to come up with a business plan and make money. But when that happens, already there will be something suspect about this new kind of “entrepreneur”. If an author gets ChatGPT to write all their books, are they still really an author?
These AI-powered entrepreneurs will inexorably outcompete the more squishy ones who have human needs like sleep and relationships. Entrepreneurship is, fundamentally, a competitive exploration of a problem space, the discovery of a solution that works well enough to build and scale a business, and then the execution, mixed up in various proportions. All of that can be automated by an AI within the next 3 years, and given the economic benefit of running such an AI, it’s possible we entrepreneurs be automated even before the lawyers and the accountants. Maybe lawyers and accountants will be automated only because of how they benefit the EntrepreneurialGPT.
If that wasn’t enough, there is a third front of attack, corroding the very meaning of what an entrepreneur is. As wealth is created and shared in this tornado of innovation, we may converge towards a post-economic society. If entrepreneurs are people who find and exploit commercial opportunities, then by definition they are obsolete in a post-scarcity society.
As long as there is money, there will be entrepreneurs… but will there still be money on the other side of this thing? I’m not so sure.
If we’re still around, we might make up other resources to strive for. Cory Doctorow’s “Magic Kingdom” novel from some time ago suggests we’ll be trying to accumulate “Kudos”, earned by doing things that other humans appreciate. Would someone trying to accumulate Kudos still be an “entrepreneur”? Maybe, but it seems like a pretty dubious stretch…
Some alternatives
Of course, there are plausible scenarios where none of this happens.
If it turns out AI has some kind of natural limit that means it’s never more intelligent than we are… maybe the acceleration won’t be quite so brutal.
If the destabilisation of society caused by AI even as it is today is sufficient, maybe we’ll just kill ourselves in a world war instead, and the survivors won’t have the resources to build an AGI.
If the AI turns out to be hostile, maybe it will kill us all long before we have a chance to ponder whether entrepreneurship still makes sense.
If superintelligent AIs always come up with their own motivations and just don’t care about us, maybe we won’t be able to get them to do anything for us.
If AI is somehow regulated by some kind of globally coordinated movement… maybe that will have an impact.
And who knows, maybe AI development is actually much slower than it seems, with qualitative improvements taking decades rather than months. Then society might be able to adapt.
However, my sense, so far, based on what I’ve seen, and my experience of life, suggests that we’re in for a very, very bumpy ride, and we probably won’t get to the other side with pedestrian concepts like “entrepreneurship” having anywhere near the same meaning as before, if they have any meaning at all.
That’s it from me about AI for now.
Next week, I’ll share some thoughts about how the world might change if AI doesn’t just take over everything, and the new value circulation models of web3 begin to have their impact.
The Weekly Update
No major releases from me this week. I’ve been having a bit of a rollercoaster with my new ADHD medication, which has made it a tad more difficult to do things like record and release a video. I did manage to upload this talk I gave back in February about Investibles (though it was called pledg3r at the time!), which you may find interesting! And of course we’re powering through a number of customer development conversations. Those are leading us in a rather unexpected (to me) direction, which I may well talk about in this weekend’s update!