Future

The key to thriving in the age of AI is to focus on finding the right jobs and tasks.

A lot of tasks will be done automatically as AI and robots improve. These are the jobs to avoid, as they are bound to go away.

But a lot more tasks will be enhanced by improvements in AI and robotics. These are the areas to explore.

Because as technology improves, so does our ability to handle more and bigger opportunities. Robotics should assist in these roles. Humans still need to be central to the success of the task.

Find these tasks and job security is all but guaranteed.

An easy way to get much better results from an AI assistant (like ChatGPT or Gemini) is to give it a role, focus, task, and goal at the start.

For instance, instead of:

Generate a strategy for a new webinar series for our business.

Try this:

Act as a world class expert in webinars with a focus on [your business niche].

Deeply explore what ingredients goes into a high performing webinar series.

Then based on your findings, generate a remarkable strategy for a new webinar series for our business.

There are so many reasons to be excited about being alive during this era…

Unprecedented access to knowledge - almost any question can be answered in seconds, we just need to know what to ask.

Healthcare advancements - not only are we on the precipice of solving most diseases, humans (of all wealth classes) are about to start aging backwards.

Poverty at historic lows - robotics and access to advanced technology is currently lifting billions out of poverty and malnutrition.

Limitless potential - barriers to technology access, career paths, and specialized education are all but gone… upward mobility has never been more possible than it is now.

🚀

By the end of this decade, we will have instant, faster-than-light communication thanks to quantum entanglement. How?

The newest AI model Grok 4 Heavy just got 100% on the math benchmark, meaning it basically can answer anything related to math.

In the next 2-3 years, newer models will “solve” physics. Meaning our scientists will have the ability to explore the depths of quantum mechanics and find all sorts of previously unknown phenomena about our universe.

As we learn how quantum entanglement works, we will be able to build technologies that can connect two locations (anywhere in the universe) and have instant communication between them.

What this will mean for our economy is unknown, given that things like high-frequency trading of stocks, planet-to-planet conversations, the irrelevancy of fiber optic networks, etc will transform everything.

It’s such an exciting time to be alive!

You’ve probably heard people say AI is going to take jobs. But that’s not the full story.

AI isn’t replacing jobs… it’s replacing today’s jobs. And that’s a big difference.

Think about it: 20 years ago, no one even knew what a social media manager was. The role didn’t exist.

And the truth is, not everyone dreams of being a paralegal or accountant. Maybe you always wanted to work with kids, explore the ocean, or pursue something totally different.

AI opens up entirely new paths for us to do work we actually care about.

The future isn’t about fewer jobs. It’s about more possibilities, new problems to solve, and opportunities we haven’t even imagined yet.

🚀 🌙

Let’s imagine a time traveler from the year 2035 goes back into the past and tells people what life is like for them…

10,000 years ago: “You don’t hunt and gather all day, what do you do?”

1,000 years ago: “You don’t farm and make your clothes all day, what do you do?”

100 years ago: “You don’t work in a steel factory all day, what do you do?”

Today: “You don’t commute and go sit in a cubicle all day, what do you do?”

The middle of the grocery store is about to disappear.

Right now, there are typically two regions in any grocery store: the fresh food along the walls and processed food throughout the inside aisles.

But what happens when we all have a robotic chef in our homes? One that can make nearly any meal or snack with fresh food?

Instead of packaged foods that taste good because of additives, we’ll have gourmet foods that taste great because of robotic mastery.

Prediction by 2030: construction workers and tradespeople, like electricians and plumbers, will NOT work on new buildings.

Humans will only be needed for repairs and renovations to older buildings. As all new buildings will be built and maintained by robots.

Because if a house can be 3D-printed and finished by robots, the buildings will also be designed to be repaired by robots too.

For instance, have a plumbing leak in a new building? A robot could be dispatched instantly to fix the pipe, at no additional charge and without any delays.

There will come a time when most assets will be powered by crypto., Your house deed will be a token on a blockchain., Your insurance policy will be a smart contract on a blockchain., And many more assets: video game items, concert tickets, health records, etc.

But the vast majority of folks won’t even know this is happening. It’s infrastructure and only a sliver of folks care about tech.

Most people will simply have a digital wallet where all of these items live.

The new milestone up ahead for AI will be the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Which basically means, the system is completely autonomous and can think for itself.

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Her” with Joaquin Phoenix, the AI character played by Scarlett Johansson is a good example of an AGI.

And so, the interesting thing about AGI, is the wide array of predictions of when it will emerge. I’ve heard in 5 years, I’ve heard in 20 years, and I’ve even heard: never!

But in reality, with the rise of vector embeddings via Pinecone, interaction frameworks such as LangChain, and models like GPT-4… they are all accelerating this race to AGI faster than most realize.

Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have AGI by the end of 2023.

Some AI optimism for Monday…

While it’s fairly obvious that most of our current job titles are going to be eliminated by AI and automation. It’s not all bad.

Because what is a job? It’s simply a set of tasks we do to solve problems.

For instance, some people solve the challenges of accounting. Some people solve the challenges of writing. And some people solve the challenges of manufacturing.

All three of these challenges are being solved in ways which will no longer involve humans.

But in the process of solving these relatively mundane challenges, new problems will become apparent.

From childcare and education to climate change and sustainability, we will always have problems to solve.

This provides all of us an opportunity to re-skill and pursue bigger challenges. And to solve problems that’ll lead humanity into a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance.

About 100 years ago, lots of people made saddles for horses. They would train and improve their skills as saddle makers.

These saddle makers were experts at their craft. And even while the first automobiles hit the roads, they had decades of “job security” ahead of them.

But over time, their skills became unnecessary. As the horseless-carriage made horses irrelevant for the average traveler.

Fast forward to today… we are ALL saddle makers, diligently doing our craft, about to be irrelevant because of artificial intelligence.

We are speeding towards a future where everything is free. Deflation is happening all around us.

Think about it, what do we truly need to pay for anymore?

If you’re willing to use a two year old iPhone, you can have a super computer in your pocket for FREE.

If you’re willing to sit through ads, you can watch nearly any show/movie ever created for FREE.

If you’re willing to share your personal data, you can have nearly any software (maps, docs, email, etc) for FREE.

If you’re willing to make some compromises on products, brands, timelines, and privacy… many of the once-expensive aspects of life is now FREE.

I feel like people are seriously underestimating how much the world will change this decade. Artificial intelligence is evolving at such a rapid pace, governments and legacy organizations won’t keep up. Our only hope is the companies in the USA remain the dominant players in the industry.

And if there were ever an argument FOR the big tech monopolies, it would be on the grounds of national security in regards to AI development. Whoever wins the race, wins nearly everything else.

I don’t think most people realize how quick AI and robotics are advancing. Most current jobs will be gone soon.

But there’s hope, you only need three skills to stay relevant:

1. creativity
2. communication
3. work well with tech

Without all three of these, there will be very little opportunities to earn a living. And livelihoods will be dependent on what the government provides, through something like Universal Basic Income (UBI).

But with these three skills, there will be a world of abundance available. New business models and job roles will be created for those who can provide value in this new economy.

When I try to control an Apple device via “Hey Siri” about 5 different devices fire up before the one I want to control 🤷♂

In a perfect world, we’d be able to name each device. But if we didn’t say “Siri” it would completely devalue the service.

Because functionally, there’s really no difference between Siri, Alexa, Google, and others. They all play music, set alarms, etc.

Pretty amazing that voice control is essentially a commodity holding onto only one word (its name) to survive.

Thought experiment:

Imagine you are 1) riding in a driverless car, 2) there are a lot of people around you, and 3) you’re about to crash.

How does the car decide who dies in the car crash?

http://news.mit.edu/2018/how-autonomous-vehicles-programmed-1024

If you’re familiar with the trolley-problem in philosophy, it’s quite similar. Do you save one person you know or save five people you don’t know?

But this time, does the car save its occupants, the baby in the stroller, or the crowd of people?

Automation and artificial intelligence has a lot of unsolved ethical challenges ahead.

#automation

I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about Internet security, cyber warfare, and the fate of our fragile technological society.

Here’s why I’m seeing hope:

There’s a rapidly evolving technology called Machine Learning. It’s the precursor to AI (and the foundation of my software company).

And with ML, we mere humans can feed a computer (the machine) with a bunch of data to process, allowing it to make probabilities and determinations (learn).

With cyber warfare, our systems are continually getting attacked.

While in the short run these attacks mean emails get leaked, passwords hacked, and credit cards stolen.

But in the long run, these attacks offer plenty of data for our defense systems to continually learn. Making them smarter and smarter.

Consequently, it will become harder and harder to achieve a successful cyber attack.

A new hope.

When was the last time you downloaded an application onto your personal computer? Probably not in a long while. If you’re like me you open a web browser and access anything you need via the Internet.

This is inevitable for mobile devices. Applications - or as Steve Jobs wisely renamed them ‘apps’ - on a phone are bound for the same demise. As a result, app stores and the need to download apps will soon be nostalgia.

But just as applications on the PC were popular for decades, native apps currently have a stronghold on mobile devices because they allow for more functionality and interactivity.

So here’s my native vs web prediction: As mobile web browsers improve and bandwidth increases - just as our desktop experience improved - web apps will win the war.

Long live HTML, long live the web!