I've been seeing this statement circulate online:
"You have about 36 months to make it."
And it makes sense: AI is and will continue to replace jobs no matter how much people fight against it. Money as we know it will change or even cease to exist because millions of ASIs (artificial superintelligences) will rapidly execute tasks beyond human comprehension, dictating humanity's future (see: AI 2027). Aside the point, this is the last time you'll see absurd gains in cryptocurrency because the technology is being adopted and regulated. After it's adopted, it becomes like stocks.
My intention with this letter isn't to scare you or sound sensationalist. All of this is prediction and speculation. It can absolutely be wrong, and I expect most of it to be. I am simply setting the scene of the discussion happening in niche pockets of the internet. My hope is to provide you with a non-dogmatic perspective that allows you to notice opportunities and make decisions that don't leave you trapped, because it is obvious that something is changing, and the future will come intensely fast.
I do not think you have 36 months to make it.
Instead, I think you have 36 months before the definition of "making it" is radically transformed.
Thankfully, human nature remains the same, and I can't help but think that this period of rapid growth is marking a clear distinction between machines and humans.
Those who lean into their humanity will thrive.
Those who can't stop identifying with mechanical living, on the other hand, will not.
Doers vs directors
We're going to see 10 person $1B companies pretty soon… In a group chat I have with my tech CEO friends, there's a betting pool for the first year that there will be a one-person $1B company.
– Sam Altman
One thing is certain:
The amount of power an individual has today is vastly more than any other moment in the past, and that will only continue to increase. This power transfer has occurred in 3 layers.
The internet gave people access to any and all knowledge. Power transferred away from schools and institutions.
Social media gave people the leverage to attract their own audience. Power transferred away from employers, publishers, centralized media, and even record labels. People can now learn, build, and earn without being dependent on someone else's authority.
Artificial intelligence is giving people the ability to create, automate, and outsource almost anything. Power is transferring away from traditional gatekeepers and intermediaries. People will soon be able to operate at the level of large teams with a fraction of the manpower.
In short, you now have three superpowers to take control of your future.
- Learning – the ability to adapt and figure out what actions you must take to get a specific result.
- Persuasion – the ability to build trust and attract people to a mutually beneficial vision or narrative.
- Execution – the ability to turn ideas into reality through automation, creation, and delegation.
This creates a clear distinction between those who will thrive and those who won't.
Doers vs directors. Employees vs entrepreneurs. Low-agency vs high-agency. Those who assign work rather than having work assigned to them. Those who pursue their interests and do many things. Those who don't need permission to solve a problem, and since new problems emerge as reality gets complex, and AI is accelerating complexity toward infinity, problems are infinite, therefore value in the form of solutions are infinite. Money, not as the US dollar but as value exchange, is also, in fact, infinite.
Those who prepare themselves to solve the problems of the future, even when nobody can possibly know what those problems can be, will win. Plain and simple. The One-Person Business Launchpad helps with this.
Taste is the new intelligence
The anti-AI crowd will lose.
There will be an uproar of highly emotional people attempting to discredit those who attempt to leverage AI in their work, especially their creative work. Ignore these people and do not become one, because maintaining a pessimistic mindset for the next few years will only lead to a destructive confirmation bias. You become what you focus on, and by focusing on trying to stop an avalanche from the bottom of the mountain, you will get crushed.
What these people don't yet understand is that the way we create is evolving just before. Photography and video are extremely recent developments on the timescale of humanity. Photo editing software and computer-generated graphics allowed us to create such unrealistic scenes with a few button clicks. Yes, it's difficult to create those things, but it is a lot easier than a few years ago. Just because a few clicks on your screen are being replaced with natural language doesn't mean it's any easier to create something we see as art, especially when what we see as art changes as culture does, and culture is shifting rapidly right now. We don't consider people artists for what specific tool they use. We consider people artists for why and how they use the tool. We grade them on the final product. The story. The emotion. The vision. The soul. Not the hours of labor that went into creating it. You can spend 10 years or 10 seconds writing a book and call yourself an author, but that doesn't mean the book is good.
This is what the anti-AI crowd gets wrong.
They lump anyone using AI into the same category. They see AI as a chat box for short sentences where you type "write this newsletter for me" or "generate this image for me," and while the output of those requests may look visually appealing, that doesn't mean they are art. It simply exposes that most people have put too much emphasis on the labor that goes into creating something visually appealing, so that it has become their identity, and people will fight tooth and nail to avoid limiting themselves less. I do not believe that art should be tied to the buttons of a tool people press, but to why they pressed that specific series of buttons.
I think we can all agree that outsourcing all thought and control to the AI won't get you anywhere, but people who focus on this do not understand anything beyond the surface of what AI is. They don't see that AI has become a programming language for language itself. They don't see that you can give highly specific instructions to the AI to the point of having full control over the output (this is what most employed "creative work" is anyway, you're executing project instructions that you didn't set – this isn't art but industrial work disguised under the job title of "artist").
They don't understand that a word is the new brush stroke, the new low-pass filter, the new select and mask. They don't understand that every minor decision an artist makes that imbues their personal touch into their work is still available, and that they can create more than what their wildest dreams allowed without spending hours doing so, but they just can't see beyond random text box generations.
The single distinction that will separate art from slop is taste.
In other words, nothing has changed. People just hate what's new, and that new is shining a light on what mattered in the first place. If you can't create art with AI, you were never an artist to begin with. You were simply good at using a tool. Tools get replaced.
Utility vs meaning
Silicon solves utility so carbon can transcend to meaning.
We hate long lines at the DMV. We hate when a server gets our order wrong. We hate meetings that could have been a 5-bullet point email. AI and automation solve necessary work that humans hate. On the other hand, we crave the potential for failure. We love the final batter in the 9th inning. We travel across the world for a 5 star dining experience. We cry at a wedding as the bride and groom read handwritten vows.
Machines are for speed, repetition, and necessity.
Humans are for story, novelty, myth and meaning.
Most people identify with the traits of a machine – the schooling, the job, the mundane tasks – and that's exactly why general fulfillment is abysmal. There will be a lot of turbulence in this change, and those who haven't mastered their mind won't be happy with that, but we've collectively hated industrial living for decades now. You have no room to complain, because there's a 99% chance that your life will be inconceivably better than it is today.
Zoom in and it's scary, zoom out and it's wonderful.
As mechanical work gets replaced, what's left is meaning.
To figure out what you want in life, choose something you deeply care about, dissect it ruthlessly, and shamelessly share your story, values, vision, and accompanying life's work in public to form an artisan-esque lifestyle with a small tribe of people who support what you do. Pair that with AI and you free up room for leisure: the ultimate compliment to creative work.
How to prepare
36 months to make it.
That's not set in stone, but it's as accurate a number as you're going to get.
You can either sit back and do what you've been doing or use this as a moment of urgency to turn your life around. Personally, I don't see why you wouldn't pick the second option. Changing your life and setting yourself up for an incredible future doesn't require you to drop everything and move across the country. It requires you to choose your work. It requires you to think. It requires you to pursue something you care about. It requires you to take risks, create a story worth telling, and share it with those who can benefit.
Everything that created "the good life" in the past is becoming a requirement.
1) Become a philosopher-builder
There are 2 types of people we tend to respect in today's world.
Programmers vs marketers. Big picture vs technical details. Spiritual vs practical. Philosophers vs scientists.
The future demands that we merge these polar ends. A builder has always needed a thinker. A programmer not paired with a marketer almost always leads to a disappointing number of users. A hippy stuck in the sky and a scientist stuck in an atom are both missing the truth. Those who can embody this duality become unstoppable, and we're already seeing it happen.
Job titles are merging from "designer" and "engineer" to "design engineer." The tools, AI-powered or not, are at a point where people can do more without added hours of labor.
Creators are founding and fueling companies. Coders are generating millions of views on social media.
The peak of human ability lies in being a specialized generalist. Not so specialized that you get replaced in an instant or taken advantage of because you are identified with a credential, but not so generalized that you are effective at effectively nothing.
2) Become a filter for ideas
Ideas now matter more than execution.
If taste is the new intelligence, and curation is the new IQ test in a world where information is overflowing and anyone can create anything, choosing what ideas deserve to be executed deserves the first seat at the table.
Your mind must become a finely tuned signal-to-noise filter.
For that to happen, you must understand that your mind interprets reality based on your identity and worldview. Your values and beliefs. The code you live by. Your level of development. The vision you are attempting to actualize. Your brain releases dopamine when information is useful toward your main and overarching goals.
Since most people don't have goals, or their goals were assigned by schools and jobs, this is an incredibly painful process, and only those who commit to a revolt against the default path in life will begin to tune their instinct in such a way that allows future-forward ideas to be caught and leveraged.
The only way to know what ideas are worth executing is to forge your own philosophy in the fire of trial and error.
3) Become an AI orchestrator
The first and foundational decision to make when adopting AI lies in when to leverage it and when to do it by hand.
Usually, that decision lies in what you enjoy doing. For me, that's writing. While I have various prompts I use for research and developing ideas (one of my favorites is a prompt that takes the topic I give it and asks observational questions until I personally reach an "aha" moment I can use in my writing), all of my letters are written by hand. AI is a tool that enhances my writing rather than replacing it.
Outside of your craft, I see AI prompts as highly specialized employees. I hate marketing, so I train the AI on information from marketers I respect, give it my frameworks, examples, or sources of inspiration, and have it spit out a first draft that I can then refine according to instinct and taste. By the end, it is higher quality, but not much different than what I would have put out if I did it myself.
Specialize in your craft, orchestrate a fleet of tasteful prompts that align with your values and vision.
If you haven't already started, the best way to learn AI is to try automating yourself out of a job.
Yes, that increases the chances of your current job being replaced, but you would have been replaced anyway if you could automate it, and at least this would upskill you to the point of either getting a promotion or being able to work for yourself.
I'll continue digging into these in future letters.
Thank you for reading this one.
– Dan