Why AGI Isn’t as Important as ACI
The alluring promise that if you never answer emails again and sell supplements from a landing page you can have money come into your bank account while you sip Mai Tais on a beach somewhere?
This book’s popularity and success 20 years ago tells us everything we need to know about the coming AI wave.
Artificial General Intelligence (or AGI) is meaningless, Artificial *Capable* Intelligence is everything: AI that can print investors money on demand.
Since as long as there’s been digital anything, people have been trying to fill their bank accounts while doing as little as humanly possible—I dare say it’s the American Dream! After all, who wouldn’t want to retire by the age of 23!?
Sure, some of us enjoy meaningful work, but the vast majority of us just want to lounge on a beach and never have to worry about money ever again.
Well, AI is nothing more than the ultimate money machine—the logical evolution of the last several decades of Blitzscaling wisdom.
Finally, a system that prints money for you without anyone having to do anything.
Who cares how it works, why it works, or what it does, as long as the bank account inputs exceed the cost outputs.
If efficiency is simply removing any unnecessary step—like checking emails—between doing nothing and profiting, then Tim Ferriss was off by over 3 hours!
Side note: Buy my new book, The 15-Minute Workweek.
The Future of Tech Is... Hard to Explain
The era of explainable complexity ended with E=MC².
Sure you know Einstein’s famous equation, but be honest, you have no idea what it means.
And it’s not your fault. Gone are the days of individual contributions to science and tech, now begins the black box era of tech, where Quantum Computers crack impossible codes and AI models solve intractable problems without any single human being able to explain their reasoning.
With AI, software’s complexity will dwarf that of the great pyramids by orders of magnitude, and no single person will be able to understand any of it—much less how it all interacts.
“ChatGPT: Make me a profitable Amazon store that does $1 million a year in revenue. Design the product and negotiate the deals for me, create a web store, and collect the money on my behalf!” But who knows what it’s doing?
And that’s just it: As humans, we expect that any breakthrough technological advancement will be so elegant as to be easily explained, E=MC², DUH!
The reality is, the future will be utterly incomprehensible to even the world’s smartest humans. Now compare the genius brains of Silicon Valley to the folks on governing bodies who can’t find an emoji on their iphone, and it’s easy to see that we’ve got a massive communication problem on our hands.
Just because we won’t be able to explain our breakthroughs doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in trying.
Human progress is accelerating, and what was once cutting edge will be obsolete by the time your Pop Tart comes out of the toaster.
The world of today and tomorrow needs, more than ever, humans who know how to make the complex as simple as possible.
Steve Jobs Was a Vibe Coder
Steve Jobs famously said: “Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.”
Let’s not forget the rationale behind that statement: In the early days of Apple, Wozniak was the technical one. Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs makes it clear that at first, non-technical Jobs’ place in Apple was anything but secure.
Without a genius partner like Woz, Jobs surely wouldn’t have become one of the world’s most influential people.
But as time went on (and perhaps in self-justifying defense of himself), Jobs started to see and value exactly what *he* brought to the table.
Sure, he couldn’t solder microchips and code assembly, but it became clear that introverted Woz wouldn’t have been able to build Apple by himself, either.
Now? “Vibe coding” is the rapidly-expanding practice of using AI to code, instead of writing code manually.
Many dyed-in-the-wool programmers understandably look down on this practice.
But love it or hate it, we’re entering a world in which all of us will have countless minions (basically for free) to do our bidding.
This means that all of us will increasingly be the players of the orchestra, and the musicians will increasingly be AI.
We’ll all be a lot more like Jobs, and we’ll all be a lot more like entrepreneurs have always been: in charge of finding novel ways to get musicians to play in harmony.
Some people in this world are musicians, and some people play the orchestra.
To thrive with the rise of AI, every musician needs to learn how to play an orchestra of their own.
The “Rare You” Hypothesis
Do you ever go down Wikipedia rabbit holes? Where you keep clicking and clicking, until you’ve learned about something new?
On one such journey years ago, I remember discovering the “Rare Earth Hypothesis”. The basic idea is: if there are trillions of stars and trillions of planets out there, surely there must be other life forms out in the universe, right?
But if we haven’t heard from anyone yet, are we actually alone? And if we are alone, how could that be in a universe of near infinite possibility?
The Rare Earth Hypothesis suggests that, while any one of our planet’s characteristics could be common, we have a series of unlikely traits that might have led to life developing on this planet and nowhere else. Not only are we the right distance from a star of the right size, we have the right-sized moon in the right orbit with the right gravitational pull to create tides and to shield us from asteroids, and the list goes on... Each individual trait of Earth might be common, but stack them all together? And the probability of finding another Earth shrinks, exponentially—maybe a trillion planets isn’t enough for another Earth to exist.
At least, that’s the theory…
In people it’s the same. In business it’s the same. Any one of your traits can be replaced easily. But stack your many common traits and skills together, and you have a truly irreplaceable person in a sea of billions.
Order Will Be Restored
One day, order will be restored
The money will be returned.
The mess will be cleaned.
The chaos will subside.
The cycle continues.
