Build for Humans
Bet on humans to break the intelligence curse.
Dear SoTA,
If you’re young, ambitious, and in tech, AI is the obvious thing you should do. But AI… for what?
Most of the visions you’ll encounter are aimed at building AI to replace something. AI B2B SaaS for dentists, designed to replace receptionists. AI agents for NFT trading, intended to automate new grads.
But at its core, no matter where it starts, no matter how far it seems removed from your life, that something getting replaced ends up being you. You are building the tools to write yourself out of the economy.
I’ll be blunt: the technological revolution we are approaching is probably going to end most white collar work as we know it. And there are a lot of people already working to write humans out of the economic equation. Your choice to build or not to build in this paradigm is not going to change that outcome.
But, you could build for the world after.
The total addressable market (TAM) for labor-replacing tools is going to be unimaginably large. But I suspect that displaced workers are not going to give up at the end of the era of the megacorporation.
Instead, there’s an opportunity to build tools that exploit the weaknesses in existing paradigms. We could be at the cusp of a small business revolution, powered by what models cannot do. As people leave the megacorps, you could be the determining factor between their economic relevance or their resignation to a life after earning and owning.
If taste is a bottleneck, displaced workers could use tools that harness their unique taste. If local knowledge is necessary, AI tools could communicate that knowledge between people on the ground and AIs up above. By taking advantage of these barriers today, we could build a world where everyone owns a small part of the AI future.
If what you build is required for people to compete in this new economy—like today’s smartphones or laptops—your TAM is every person on Earth.
I’m not saying AGI won’t eventually do every job better than every human. However, when we arrive at the day this comes true, we could live in one of two worlds:
In the first world, we built for AI. As automation crept up the corporate pyramid, newly displaced workers didn’t have an entry-point into the next economy. Maybe we get universal basic income, maybe we don’t. Either way, powerful actors might be liberated from their need to care about regular people. With humans rendered economically irrelevant, you could be dependent on than the omnibenevolence of the state until the end of time.
In the second world, we built for humans. The window that opened between the end of white collar work and intelligence beyond what we can fathom dispersed economic power as new actors harnessed intelligence to build in their slice of the world. Every person is connected to the post-AGI economy through ownership of some key part of it. Humans remain relevant, through both what they accrued in the critical moment and because we’ve built tools that expand their agency, rather than restrict it.
So to recap, what should you build? You have two choices:
Create a post-human economy by building for AI.
Create the next human economy by building for humans.
I think you should choose the latter.
Yours,
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