AI is Eating the World

I grew up in a small college town in rural Massachusetts where the employment breakdown was an odd mix between farmers, professors and coaches. In high school I read Warren Buffet’s Snowball, and because I had no idea what professions made money outside of Doctors and Lawyers (at the time I did not like school, so these tracks were absolute non-starters), my college selection process was decided solely on what school will get me to Wall Street. A bit narrow-minded, but my Dad was OK with it since ROI was at the heart of the decision. And with one application sent out, I began my undergraduate career at Trinity College in the Fall of 2010.

Of course, at the time the world was rocked by a recession caused by the people I wanted to become. However, I wasn’t dissuaded by the macroenvironment and continued picturing a pinstripe and shiny-shoed career. Right around mid-way through my second-year, after a heavy course load in economics and speaking with a number of industry vets wayyy ahead of the all-important Junior year summer internship, it was clear that the Wall Street career I was romanticising was all but dead. In hindsight I was quite happy with my decision to be a “B” student; I actually got very few “B’s”, instead receiving “A’s” in the classes I liked and “C’s” in the classes I did not. Without these results, I would not have been so active networking wayyyy ahead of time to try and secure an extremely competitive internship against candidates with far-better GPAs and far-more qualified. Also, I would have run the risk of not liking the position and getting a real-world “C”.

Even with these doubts I did the Manhattan summer grinding at a boutique commercial real-estate firm. Thankfully I liked most of the work, and did well, but knew it wasn’t for me. And so I entered my final-year of college knowing that I didn’t want to do exactly what I came to college for. Early in the year, however, I read Marc Andressen and Ben Horowitz’s seminal Wall-street Journal article titled “Software is Eating the World.” In it, they outlined how software companies have, and will continue to, disrupt and ultimately replace mature companies in mature industries. The examples outlined included Skype becoming the fastest growing and third-largest (behind AT&T and Verizon) telecommunication company in the world, Spotify and iTunes all but replacing the record industry, and LinkedIn becoming the world’s largest recruiting firm. Andressen and Horowitz themselves were rockstars in their own right. In the 1990’s they founded and took NetScape, the world’s first internet browser, public which led to one of the craziest and most historic economic bubbles of the modern era. At the time of the article, they had long since hung up their entrepreneurial shoes in place of building one of the world’s premier VC shops investing in big, and often crazy, ideas at a very early stage in their portfolio companies’ life cycle. Famous winners include Facebook, Twitter, Lyft, and also include soon-to-be winners like Coinbase and Stripe. Like many college students around 2013 inspired by this environment, I tried starting my own software company (Andreessen, WSJ).

After building a prototype nearing the end of my senior year, CoApp was a far cry from the idea I wrote my business plan on at the beginning of the year; greek-afiliated alumni websites and directories, intended to help college grads get jobs through their greek connections. Truth be told, I can’t even tell you one problem this prototype solved after it was built, I pivoted and incorporated any feature I thought sounded cool to the point where I lost the one deal in my pipeline due to customer confusion: my alma mater Trinity College.

On the brightside, however, the experience led to an incredibly unique opportunity joining a startup quickly after college. One with a solid and experienced executive team, was generating revenue and could pay well at the entry-level; good thing since I had less than $50 in my bank account at graduation. Black Duck was the world’s leader in open source risk management. Did I have a passion for open source software? No. Did I even know what open source was? It’s debatable whether I know what it is today. However, with a new CEO at the helm the early-stage company was about to make a significant turnaround after years of stagnant growth with a new, flagship platform for the increasingly massive software security space. As the first sales guy hired for these efforts, I had an incredible experience helping build something from scratch, and saw first-hand how software was indeed eating the world.

If you’ve made it this far into the paper and are thinking, “did he just put AI in the title as clickbait," I say hang on just a couple more sentences.

If software eating the world defined the early part of the 21st century, I’ll make a bold prediction and say that AI eating the world will define the rest of the century. While software was able to significantly scale down the physical resources, cost and manpower required to operate and maintain major industries, Artificial Intelligence may eliminate these tenets altogether. AI’s effects are already present today. Working in wealth management as recently as ten years ago was an incredibly lucrative profession. In 2008, however, a company called Betterment launched the first robo-advisor platform. Instead of paying a certified financial advisor to allocate your capital into investment vehicles to build wealth, a machine-learning algorithm can do it for you. Personally, Betterment was the first non-employee sponsored investment vehicle I used and it performed as well, if not better, than my other professionally managed investment funds. Additionally, agriculture and manufacturing is getting eaten alive by robots performing assembly-line work more efficiently than human laborers. Finally, I have discussed the predicament the automobile industry is in as a result of AI ad nauseum in my previous articles, but thought it would be worth repeating that employment that requires driving (e.g. trucking) will no longer be necessary in the short-term.

I’ve discussed the difference between Narrow and General AI in previous papers. As a refresh, Narrow AI is defined as the technology that is available at present, defined as machine learning that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency in one specific area (e.g. assembly-line robots), and General AI is a computer that is as smart as a human across the board and can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It’s easy to conceptualize how Narrow AI is affecting industry today; incredibly efficient in repetitive tasks through machine’s learning and how to process volumes of data better and faster. General AI are those efficient machines learning how to operate a little bit more independently. It can be thought of as automated vehicles being able to navigate complex and nuanced cities. This technology is not yet here, but will be highly impactful within the next decade-or-so.

The last AI paradigm, Super Intelligence, will be monumentally impactful to society at large when it arrives. It is defined as an intellect that is much smarter than the best human minds in practically every field including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. Which begs the question; what will life look like with the automated CEO? If machines gain the skill set to think in a manner that is not only more efficient but also more creative, what value is even the smartest human to economic output? The answer is none. If robots can do everything for us and progress society at a much better rate, can we all go to a tropical island and gas beers with our buddies until we perish? Or will these man-made beings render the human race obsolete like some cliched sci-fi movie?

To be perfectly candid, I feel a little out of my league speculating on this dystopian reality. However, I’ll look to trends from forward-thinking entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to understand the future of humanity. Let’s look at notorious visionary Elon Musk and two of his projects; Neuralink and SpaceX. Neuralink is a neurotechnology company, simply put, they supply computer chips designed to be implanted into brains to augment cognitive functioning. While today the technology is reserved for normalizing brains with significant disorders (like epilepsy), it offers a glimpse into a logical next iteration; would a “normal” brain be able to use a chip to significantly enhance intelligence and act as a computer? Through neurotechnology will we be able to phase out computers and mobile devices as sources for infinite information? Perhaps this is our next level of evolution-where man and machine become one.

Personally, I believe any technology-aided shortcut to progress society, without humans or through some cyborg type being, violates the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (self-actualization). Born into a world in which there was no need for human development, hard work, and struggle for society to progress, is anathema to human nature. Sure, a world in which we can live on autopilot and live hedonistically may sound appealing in concept, the collective reality would not last long as humans would naturally seek ways in which they can provide value. If technology progresses to this level, and it’s infrastructure was so concrete that it’s reversal would be all but impossible, colonizing other environments like Mars or the ocean may be a way to solve this problem. While companies like SpaceX have grand ambitions to colonize Mars in case climate change or overpopulation make Earth uninhabitable, the colonization of Mars may happen because of a collective demand to return to our basic needs. Once AI and its derivative technology (like quantum computing) get to this level of sophistication, everyone left will ask: where can we provide value?

Heck, I’d rather be Matt Damon in The Martian than Will Smith in iRobot. 

Andreessen, Marc. “Why Software Is Eating The World.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 20 Aug. 2011, www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.