Ai opportunity is misunderstood
Its impact is understated
Paradigm shifts are difficult
Ai is not about incremental change. It is a disruption and paradigm change. Not in technology but in human existence. Historically economics was about land, hands, technology, capital or talent. Land and hands became irrelevant after the industrial age. Technology and capital got democratised. It was about talent.
Now ai is the talent. So what will humans do ?? The ai ayurveda doctor can beat any doctor. By connecting with a nadi reading sensor, it eliminates the need for a human. The risk is hallucination. And that takes us to accuracy. Doctors die but ai keeps learning.
The closest analogy is the state of dream or wakefulness. Both are a reality but of different types. Everything looks real in the dream … until you snap out of it. And then it was “a dream”. Ai is that dream you can move in and out of whilst awake. Ai works on data and data doesn’t need judgement. Or opinions. In short it doesn’t need MBAs or doctors. It most certainly doesn’t need accountants or lawyers. Or judges. So where is the opportunity.
The opportunity is not in working in ai. That will need very few people. Fine tuning ai may need some domain experts. But even that number is not relevant from a population perspective. The governments are misguided and misdirected. What are these so called ai businesses ?? Are startups going to make GPUs or build neoclouds. Or write python code ?? No !!!
There is actually no ai opportunity.
New opportunities will emerge once the new age takes over. And the new age transition will have a lot of pain and uncertainty. However, nothing happens overnight. Even today we have marginal farmers ploughing fields. Or companies making steam engine equivalents. The Indian IT cos are still writing code. And seem to think they will migrate to ai and all will be well. Countries are no different. They think ai is just another category of startups. Needing another subsidy plan.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. Ai threatens the very concept of a nation state. It makes it impossible to collect taxes. It makes warfare very complex. Biowarfare is impossible to defend against. Currencies lose relevance as the concept of trust and the very notions of identity get threatened.
There are three emerging industries – cyber, longevity and interstellar travel. Of these cyber is the largest potential employer. And India has the numbers and the competencies required to lead in cyber.
Cyber is not IT services or telecom or technology. It is the virtual world akin to what we call dream. Meta spoke of a real like virtual world. The iit alumni group calls it the Megaspheres. It is a space where the digital, virtual and physical meet. In the ai age, we will live and work in this space.
A new sphere.
One we know very little about.
As yet.
Don’t look around – all we know is that we don’t know. No one knows. And that is the only truth.