Three Theses for the AI Future

& how to best position yourself for the "post-labor" economy

AI is good. At times it’s scary good.

The new tech disturbs some people. It energizes others. Either way, we can all feel the great transition ahead. There will be a memory of the world before AI, and a reality of the world with AI.

In this world, labor as we know it will no longer exist. Having a human perform work that AI could do better will become a luxury. This is what we refer to as the "post-labor" economy. We’ll explore this further below.

With AI taking on tediously repetitive work, humans will be the key creators of the new future. We are incredibly adaptable: as the environment changes, we will use new tools to explore, build & distribute.

In this article I lay out a 3 core ideas about the AI age. Internalizing these ideas is essential for developing a stable, scalable & strategic position as humanity transitions into the new era.

Let's dive in:

The Disruption Ahead

AI grants every white collar worker the tools to carry out the work of 9 colleagues. The leverage available to those that can wield the power of computer intelligence is already large, & will grow significantly over the coming decade.

The supply of knowledge worker capacity will 10x (1 human + 9 AI colleagues). It will vastly outpace the demand. Until the demand for white collar work grows, this will deeply disrupt the knowledge labor market.

The universities - that over the last 100 years have trained knowledge workers - will find themselves becoming obsolete in their current form. Today, they are teaching outdated systems for outdated work in an outdated world.
If a curious mind wants to understand something at the frontier of innovation, they shouldn’t go to college, they should go on Claude & X.
Traditional institutions of higher education will have to adapt, or fear being slashed & replaced.

It’s a matter of time until artificial intelligence gets embodied in robots, allowing it to perform physical labor. Whether it be as a car, a cloth-folding bedside lamp, or a humanoid robot. Embodied AI will be able to perform physical labor that is cheaper, safer & more effective than what any human could achieve.

On a long enough time horizon even the last frontier of physical labor will be best performed by AI driven entities.

When this happens people will not sit idle. They’ll adapt by transitioning from number-crunching in offices to exploring creative work they can share via personalized distribution channels that directly broadcast to their followers.

In other words: we are bound to see the rise of the creative economy.

The rise of the creator and their role in the economy will define the decade to come. What does that mean? Let’s explore.

You'll notice an underlying theme:

(Disclaimer: I use crypto projects as examples throughout this exposition because attention in the crypto space closely interfaces with the USD, making its effect more directly quantifiable.)

Three Theses for the AI Future (& how to adapt effectively)

1. Audience grants stability.

Audience is the most valuable asset in the post-labor world.

In a world of abundance, the scarcest thing is the most valuable. With infinite AI content, the scarcest resource is human attention.

The cost of production of most things will go to zero. In other words, there will be an abundance of products in any given market niche.

How are people going to choose which product to trust? Well- they’ll focus on brand.

They will pick the product promoted by the brand they trust.

In a world where product choice is infinite & labor is luxury, building a loyal brand audience provides resilient stability:

Audience allows you to repeatedly communicate with the people that have chosen to follow you. In other words, audience allows you to continuously engage people's attention. Audience will emerge as a source of durability in a world where everything else is rapidly changing.

Even as all else shifts - audience remains.

• Want to let people know you are offering consulting services?

• Building a new product?

• Have an idea you think will benefit society as a whole?

Share it with your audience.

Audience is the reason Pieter Levels gets thousands of users instantly on every product drop. It is also the only reason why projects like Dogecoin are still alive.

A loyal following allows brands to continuously tap into attention by sharing content.

Audience will become a source of stability in an ever-shifting world. Start building it today to establish the cornerstone of a secure tomorrow.

2. Personal brands are vastly scalable.

Personal brands are media companies, & should operate as such.

People don't follow companies, people follow people.

Elon Musk is Tesla. Marc Andressen is a16z. You are your brand.

Your personal brand is a media company telling the world a story about what you do. Similar to how companies focused on public relations in the 20th century, you should put thought into how the world perceives you via social media today.

You no longer need to engage with gatekeepers in order to reach potential audiences. Why do you think Elon build his Twitter to 225M followers & a16z launched their own podcast?

Social media allows you to directly speak to people.

By building a social media presence you are stepping into the attention arena. It's a place of cutthroat competition, & you should build the best team possible if you want to thrive.

It’s currently still impossible to run large scale media operation on your own. It’s normal for creators to hire teams of people to help them with production & monetization.

That said, generative technology grants immense leverage, & it is the worst it will ever be. AI allows you to 100x your content production. It is up to you to iterate on the 0.1% that is actually any good.

Small teams of people will soon generate the same scale of content output as large media companies did a decade ago. Your personal brand is a media company - plan to operate as such.

3. Attention is a strategic advantage.

Over a long enough time horizon attention is the only currency that matters.

AI media will create an infinite quantity of hyper-personalized content.

When content is abundant it will compete for scarce attention. This scarcity will make attention incredibly valuable.

Why?

Where attention goes, energy flows.

What is the most entrenched currency you know? The US dollar? Bitcoin? Let's take Bitcoin as example.

Let's assume you create an exact copy of Bitcoin and call it Bestcoin. Further, let's assume you have access to a quantity of human attention that is always 2x the mindshare of Bitcoin on any given day. Now, you manage to direct the attention captured by Bestcoin and infuse it with a valence that is pro-Bestcoin & anti-Bitcoin.

Over a sufficiently long time horizon, Bestcoin will flip Bitcoin as the most prominent digital currency in the world.

Let's think it through:

If you keep your campaign going for a day, not much would happen. Maybe some crypto gamblers would buy into Bestcoin.

With 2x the Bitcoin mindshare, after a couple years you might have something with a reasonable marketcap - maybe the size of a top 10 currency like Dogecoin.

After 10 years you could expect to have generated sufficient noise and energy to have convinced most users, institutions & miners to pay attention and adopt Bestcoin instead of the incumbent.

Would Bitcoin be dead? Probably not - its momentum is enormous. Will Bestcoin have flipped (i.e. surpassed) Bitcoin? Very likely.

In other words:

On a long enough time horizon even the most entrenched incumbents can be dethroned by challengers with equivalent functionality, yet larger mind share.

AI will have no impact on the total sum of human attention in the world. It's capped by the number of people alive.

On one hand - AI media will flood us with distractions, making the battle for attention more cutthroat than ever. On the other - social media has made it easier than ever to aggregate collective attention.

You can do incredible things if you manage to amass sufficient attention and continuously channel it onto a single point of focus.

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Veridis Quo…

So, is this disruption all bad?

Not really.

In many cases the labor outsourced to AI will be be cheaper, safer & more effective than anything a human can do. The cost of goods will fall into a range accessible to most. A continued democratization of baseline product accessibility via technological innovation.

For the last year, I've been working towards developing elegant AI tools that help creators build, grow & engage their audience.

I've felt a powerful drive to do so - but why?

The answer is simple:

There is no reason to believe that the need for creativity, taste & craft will become obsolete anytime soon.

So, what do we do about that?

The answer lies in the path of the creator. The economy is shifting from the centralization of the giant corporation, to the decentralization of the personal brand.

What does that mean? Well, it's never been easier to share your journey online - to "build in public" - and to get paid for it.

We are all our personal media companies now.

In a world where labor is a memory of the past... a post-labor world - what will humans do to entertain themselves & earn a living?

Humans do not sit idle. We have a propensity to follow our curiosity… to venture out to the frontier & explore it… to conquer the unknown and maybe build something along the way.

We are fascinated by the fruits of successful ventures into the unknown & continue to tell their stories centuries later. We still remember Christopher Columbus taking off to the edge of the known world, & Thomas Edison coming up with 10,000 ways of “how to not build a lightbulb” before devising a design that effectively bent electrons into visible light.

Today, your personal brand is the channel to communicate the creative achievements that emerge out of the exploration of your curiosity. Content is how you let people know your creations exits, & how you package them for consumption.

But "I'm not interesting," you might say.

Well, I hate to bring it to you, but you're not that special. Even if you have an incredibly niche interest - one that only 0.0000001% of the world population shares... that's still 8,000 people around the globe.
If all of them agree to pay you $2 for sharing & teaching your craft, you are making $16k a month. More than enough to live in most big cities. Not a bad deal, is it?

You just need to find the right audience.

Mark my words. Over the coming decade we will see the rise of millions of micro creators. And all of them will step in the attention arena.

Best to start building your audience today.

Accelerate your creativity, my friend. Embrace effective adaptation.

And remember: if you didn't share it, it doesn't exist.