The Job of the Future

I’m on vacation so this week’s newsletter will be a short one but it’s a topic that I finally think is worth talking about.

On Artificial Intelligence - A Digital Fault Line

AI is a hot topic these days. The short answer to why is because of how much digital leverage it creates. A “do more with less” technology that’s captured so much excitement with several affordable, widely accessible, and impressive AI products now available to everyday people. Like with the internet, social media, the smart phone, and other key digital age advancements, the accessibility of this high leverage tech is likely to reshape society. It’s a digital fault line creating friction between how society operated before the diffusion of AI and how it’s evolving to operate after AI is widely available.

Do not resist this technology.

On an individual level a person can harness AI tools like ChatGPT or Github’s Copilot to become more productive. Adopted at a society-wide scale, these tools remap what productivity looks like in the digital age. (as a simple example of do more with less: ChatGPT has helped me research and draft essays in half the time it normally would. For now, it’s best as a search engine but over time the use cases will expand dramatically)

Many people are choosing to take the stance of a luddite, rejecting AI as some type of evil. Others are unimpressed with the current range of tools because they’re not as useful as what science fiction write-ups say they should be.

But ChatGPT, Copilot, and other AI’s on the market are early iterations.

And in a short amount of time, the people rejecting AI will watch as their productivity shrivels in comparison to peers that adapt and adopt it to increase they're productivity. Said another way, AI will help many individuals to do more work with less energy and help them to complete tasks faster than their peers that don’t use these tools.

Ignoring the early stages of this trend is a mistake that many will look back on as a costly decision.

Saying the tech isn’t good enough to do anything yet will in hindsight look like a lazy and uninformed perspective. Likewise - fearing it as a society killer is an example of Future Shock that creates decision paralysis. ie: it’s a fear that society will fundamentally change because of AI that causes many people to bury their heads in the sand rather than take action to adapt.

This change is inevitable regardless of how it makes you feel.

Use an early prototype like ChatGPT for no more than 5 minutes and you can get an understanding of the tech, where it’s evolving towards, and build an early understanding of how to make use of it. In that time, you’ll see that it’s not going away.

So what’s the point here? Why should you go out of your way to interact with early versions of AI rather than following it at a distance?

The answer is that AI is going to spawn future professions and skillsets specifically related to the field of “prompt engineering”. In many ways, prompt engineering will become the only profession as AI proliferates.

Think of prompt engineering as the ability to understand real world problems and then properly frame and convey the problems to an AI to help solve (ex: using ChatGPT to research and then draft an essay on a topic for a target audience or Copilot to help write lines of code for an app your building).

In the near future (I’m talking very near), your ability to understand how to use AI tools and apply that knowledge specifically to your job/industry will add significant value your employer or client.

Prompt engineering will be a clear value driving differentiator between those that have the skill and those that do not.

Bringing this back to the newsletter theme of The Sovereign Individual.

This is one of those adapt or get left behind moments. You can follow herd mentalities that fear this tech. Or you can adapt and position yourself to thrive in the age where AI will no doubt integrate in significant ways into our daily lives. Your willingness and ability to identify this opportunity and take advantage of it as a high leverage moment will secure your position in the society that is influenced by AI.

Rapid Fire

• The RESTRICT Act creates blanket authority, with few checks, to ban just about anything linked to a ‘foreign adversary’ - This seems like a crazy policy getting jammed through under our collective noses. Worth educating yourself on it.

•  The Role of Bitcoin As Money - Erik Vorhees This video really feeds well into last weeks newsletter on the importance of outside money and the role bitcoin plays as an outside form of money.

• Origin Story of Venture Capital - This provides a really interesting story on some of the origins of venture capital as an industry. Ex: it was common in the whaling industry.

• Remote Banking Crisis - Banking on a return to normal scenario led many banks to find themselves with distressed loans. An interesting article exploring whether remote work is partly to blame for some of the banking crisis.

• About a third of U.S. workers who can work from home now do so all the time - “The new survey finds that 41% of those with jobs that can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule – that is, working from home some days and from the office, workplace or job site other days. This is up from 35% in January 2022.”

Extras

Some ideas for science fiction in the 2020s