Most of what you hear about AI is either hype or fear-mongering. Here’s my realistic take: AI will be hugely disruptive and lots of jobs will go, but I think people massively underestimate how good this could be, and many of those jobs are things humans shouldn’t be doing in the first place. The more interesting question is who you want to be in a world where you have far more power to make the things you care about happen.
In this episode
- Why I changed my view: AI went from an impressive parlor trick to agentic tools that do useful work, mostly by writing code.
- What “agentic” means in plain terms: the tool does the work instead of telling you how, including multi-agent build-and-test loops.
- Jevons paradox: more efficient steam engines raised demand for coal. Cheaper software might raise demand for software, unless this time is different.
- Many jobs AI replaces shouldn’t be done by humans, from screwing on bottle caps to truck driving to chasing the algorithm as a content creator.
- AI content will probably win the doom scroll. That makes me bullish on wisdom communities and offline things like circles, yoga and run clubs.
- The fisherman parable, and what a world of abundance looks like when much of it is already here.
- One person who cares can now do what used to take a team, from my work on QuitByHealing to Paul Cunningham’s vaccine for his dog Rosie and Sid Sijbrandij going founder mode on his own cancer.
- Rick Rubin as the future of work, a second internet built for agents, and who you want to be once status matters less.