A New Hope?
James Wright, CEO/Founder Zipline Technologies, Inc.
For many the prospects of AI are a wonderful thing. For one, the idea that machines will take the drudge out of grocery shopping, by ordering and replacing low stocked food and supplies. Driverless cars, curing the massive number of driving related deaths each year and making the road a place of productivity and relaxation. Or medicine, where AI will help augment how we treat disease and develop chip-implanted super humans who will undertake remote surgeries, potentially eight at a time…who knows the implications and massive changes? Perhaps they will cure death itself!
However, looming over these prospects are many of the negative aspects of AI. One can imagine a world in which the Terminator lives, which for many futurists will become a reality. However, a much more short-term implication of AI will be the elimination of jobs due to automation. No matter what any politician says about adding jobs, they are wrong. Jobs are not going to another country, they are simply being replaced by machines. There will be nothing that anyone can do, sans passing laws agains automation, effectively shuttering any chance AI could replace humans in the workforce. By 2020 there will be an additional 160M people added to the independent work category.
That’s a hell of a lot of side hustle.
This means that these people will be “self employed” in some sort of way….much of this due to the fact that they will not be able to get a job in a company as their skills and experience have been replaced by technologies that can do the job with fewer to no errors and at a fraction of the cost.
So who will thrive in this new AI economy? Some say that only the wealthy, and that the rest of the world will be left with a Minimum Viable Income, which is essentially welfare for simply existing, with fewer to no prospects of building a business or following a career opportunity that you love. However, there is one group that may do quite well in this new economy. This group is the Creative Entrepreneur category. These are artists, artisans, designers, personal shoppers, and anyone that creates or puts together creative and unique items. These are people that have a very specific love and gift that has been slowly improving and finessing over years of input, and that they use to build their art and work.
One thing that AI cannot take away is our sense of liking something for it’s emotional attributes. When we buy a painting for instance, one does not typically just say “I really like that painting and it costs $20k….I’ll just buy it.” What happens is that we ask questions about the painting, we ask about the artist.
“Who painted it?”
“Where was it painted?”
“How long did it take?”
“What does it mean?”
The painting itself, and the meaning behind the painting and the artist speak to us, and thus we buy much more than just the painting. It is this feeling of buying more than just a painting that will give creative entrepreneurs an advantage in the new economy. These entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to connect directly to their clients, and to leverage that strength of selling themselves and the meaning behind their work.
As much as the next generation will be about AI, it may also be about getting to know people much more on an individual level…more personally, and how people complement each other in a human way, in a deal, how they fit and work best. I personally do not want to live in a world where machines eliminate my ability to pursue happiness, but if it means that we as a society really begin to appreciate the arts and individuals at a much deeper level, then I think we have a very bright future indeed.
