Welcome to Sunday Morning Sermon at the Unicorn Factory. Here, we're all about shifting your thinking. Today am going to provide some food for thought.
This week, you learned to draw a map of where you're going. It's a framework called Lean Canvas, with a few modifications. The most important thing you learned is that a startup is not a business. A startup is a value proposition in search of proof, a hypothesis in search of a business model. The seed of a startup is the value proposition. You want to evaluate the value proposition. If you're starting a company, you want to think hard about this question: Is there exponential growth in the market I am getting into? Because it's easier to ride a wave than to start one yourself.
The idea of "paradigm shift", developed by Prof. Thomas Kuhn in his incredible book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is mandatory reading for a founder. Paradigm shifts in tech typically happen every 12–15 years. The Internet, The Browser, Cloud Computing, Smart phone, Blockchain, now it's AI. AI is the emergent property of teaching computers to do tasks. If you learn to recognize an image, then all you need to do is flip the process in order to generate an image, same thing with language, same way with everything. It's how anyone with a brain did it. The opposite of consumption is generation. Next comes the feedback loop between taking in and generating and taking in what was generated and applying transformative process to that, like logic.
AI isn't a fad. AI does something very, very well. It reads, collates, ranks, and grades. Think about it, that's most intellectual jobs. This isn't about blue-collar jobs. This is about white-collar jobs, and that hasn't been threatened in almost a 50 years. In an age of declining workforces and poor education, which means less and less intellectual resources, the future isn't Terminator, the future is more like Wall-E. AI will eventually become the reason human society doesn't collapse and may even be why the human species survives at all. This is going to have a huge impact on the world. AI is not a wave, it's a tsunami. So think hard about where in your processes does someone need to read, collate, categorize, rank, and you will find AI can do it better.
AI isn't sentient, and I don't know if it can ever be. Human vanity, we like to think we are sentient, but that's like 5% of the species, seriously. Examine most people's lives, routines, etc., and they are barely conscious of their existence. 90% of human life is not being used for anything other than basic subsistence. The world is mostly a ghetto. On average you are 10 blocks from substandard living conditions. We do not live in the world we see on television and movies. Go outside and look around you. Our world is built on credit and future generations will get the bill. We are very far from an advanced civilization. You need only look at our politics to see how rational we are. When we talk about the idealistic properties of the human mind that AI threatens, we are expressing our vanity. Only a few minds are in fact useful, and that is only after having endured some major, usually childhood, trauma that made them deviate from society's normal path. AI by being able to read surpasses 14% of all human beings. With a secondary education it surpasses 34%. So don't think humans are all that. The numbers don't support it. The point is, AI is more critical to the human species than we realize. Think economics. A law firm with a 1000 partners can replace 800 of those with AI and increase its productivity by 30x. If we need more educated minds we can print them. That is a very significant change. Very soon, and I mean like in 2 years, if not secretly already, you will be purchasing a mind, not a computer, not a phone, a mind. The future is a marketplace of specialized minds. Think about that.
Look at what just 5% of human intellectual productivity did in the last 100 years. If we invested in education in the past, made it a top priority, then we could have increased it by 2%, even with a halfway decent educational system. That's the difference between first world and third world countries, by the way. Now consider if a technology allowed a country to increased that output by 10%. What could humanity do then? We could eliminate disease, space travel, science, medicine, even perhaps eliminate aging and death. Now, instead of having the insurmountable task of having to convince the ignorant masses that they need to invest in education, when all they want to do is protect their experience, what if you can just find the best minds in any field and just duplicate them? You don't have one Einstein every 200 years. You have 200 evolve every year, exponentially. AI doesn't replace humans because most humans would rather not work, that is just reality, not a judgement. That is the culture consumerism created. It's not a good thing or bad thing, it's just a thing. AI represents a productivity increase of 100x for human kind in just 10 years with less environmental impact than a human. You see where I'm going here. It's not that far away. We are over the hill and we can see the shore now. What I am saying is AI is not a wave, it's a tsunami. This changes everything.
So, as you contemplate your startup's value proposition, consider how AI might play a role. Could it help solve a problem more efficiently? Could it create a transformative experience for your customers? Could it open up new markets or opportunities? Remember, we're not just building startups here, we're shaping the future. It is easier to ride a wave than to create one. And one of those tsunami's is AI. There are others already in full swing.
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