Running list of assorted predictions (consensus or contrarian) –
Adding here about AI 7.12.24:
In an AI world, you’ll still need to convince people to do things, give you their money, help you out, or share what they know. One way to (maybe) hedge against that is understanding how the world works and having a broad knowledge base.
It is valuable not because you impress people by being a walking encyclopedia (Google is helpful for that), but when you meet someone who knows a lot of random stuff, maybe you deduce that they’re curious and enjoy learning. You might deduce that they can think about complex problems because learning involves thinking about details…and when you want meaningful outcomes, sometimes that involves dealing with intricate situations. You’ll trust someone who, yes has integrity and works hard, but if someone is capable of deeply understanding complexity and can see tasks through to completion.
If you bring up a topic and someone can piece together different scenarios and learnings into something unique, that understanding unique to them might resonate with you and lead to some belief (i.e., I like this person) or action (I respect them so I will do X).
Over time, you may say the list of items humans need to do keeps declining, and eventually, it culminates in people striving to be great people: great parents, caretakers, soccer coaches, athletes, artists, and listeners because it gives you purpose and is fun. What else is there to do but eat, drink, banter, learn, teach, and explore?
—
AI:
- Normal AI derivatives of life is going to radically change
- People thought creative professions were immune but proven completely wrong
- Any fungible / process-driven work will be automated
- What will remain is basically that which indexes to a person – relationship businesses, or businesses where you actually need physical people either to do something a machine can’t do (assuming 5 years of fast technological process) or you need people you can gain trust in to do something.
Never bet against highly motivated people because 3 and 4 sigma events (i.e., very rare occurances) happen all the time (a book on this here). This includes countries too. What I’m getting at is don’t underestimate countries that think long-term and work really hard.
Culture is not that important in the short-term and extremely important in the long-term for enduring motivation and goal reaching for an team or country. However, what a group might find additive and core to their culture may end up eroding at their success in the long term. What I’m getting at is even if a city/country works really hard to be great, their culture may preclude them for ever reaching their potential. Misaligned incentives don’t help either.
Self-driving buses will be interesting.
