Every week, Diamandis publishes his Metatrends newsletter with his predictions about what lies ahead in the next decade. The latest newsletter talks about “the dematerialization of white-collar jobs.”
Is AI coming for your job?
The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, thinks so. He has issued a blunt warning to the American government and businesses: AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next five years.
As evidence to support his argument, look at over 40% of Microsoft’s most recent layoffs involving white-collar software engineers, including directors in AI-related positions.
Metatrends forecasts that by 2030, about 30% of white-collar jobs will be fundamentally transformed by AI.
Recently, OpenAI introduced Codex, a cloud-based software engineering agent capable of handling various tasks simultaneously for coders. Similar trends are happening with customer service jobs, and it is only a matter of time before humanoid robots with onboard AI take on manual labour. Right now, those jobs are temporarily spared because of the speed these robots do the job that humans can do. That, too, is changing with companies like Toyota and BMW reporting improvements in both production speed and quality on assembly lines. These robots are also capable of continuous work, 24/7, unlike their human counterparts.
Diamandis argues that white-collar job displacement is here and now as AI redefines productivity.
As AI displaces human capital across industries, we’re heading toward some version of government-issued UBI. A way to fund this could be to tax the profits of companies adopting AI. The taxes raised could pay for UBI and the retraining of displaced workers.
By 2030, expect AI systems to create entire autonomous businesses. AI-run law firms, marketing agencies, and medical offices will operate 24/7. The Bradley Sacks Semafor chart appearing above tells the story of revenue-per-employee at S&P 500 companies, which has plummeted from eight employees to generate $1 million in the 1980s to just two today. Expect a future of one-person companies with entrepreneurs conceiving a vision and using AI to orchestrate and handle everything rather than trying to compete with it.
Here’s what most miss. As jobs transform, so will living costs. Healthcare, education, therapy, and childcare will undergo radical demonetization. UBI will be part of this demonetization, while AI will make quality services more abundant and dramatically less expensive. This will help offset job displacement.
Diamandis talks about discovering the Massively Transformative Purpose (MTP) of your existence in many talks he gives at Singularity University. MTP refers to the ambition and fundamental reason for a company’s existence. Entrepreneurs who leverage AI will thrive in this new economy as company formation and acquisition cycles accelerate beyond anything previously seen. As businesses replace employees with AI, efficiency metrics will skyrocket. What Diamandis advocates is to stop thinking about looking for another job and, instead, start finding your MTP and creating value by solving problems that you care deeply about.
In a world of ubiquitous AI, the quality of the questions you ask has more value than memorization and rote learning. When I was teaching people how to sell in my previous existence working at an educational publishing company, I stated that those who excel in their jobs learn to ask “W5 and How” questions. All these open-ended questions unlock a future of possibilities. Not familiar with W5? These are questions that begin with “Who? What? Where? Why? and How?” They are essential to developing a Curiosity Mindset. They allow the questioner to approach the unknown with wonder rather than assumptions. In a world where AI disrupts those who are just rote learners, the Curiosity Mindset will become your ultimate competitive advantage, as it has been for top-performing salespeople through the years.
Amodei states in the Axios interview that, “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don’t think this is on people’s radar.” He outlines three strategies for society and governments to adopt to pre-empt the AI threat. They are:
Amodei, like Diamandis, suggests an AI surtax. Amodei sees a 3% “token tax” on company earnings coming from the use of AI as a way to fund programs to deal with transitioning to a super-intelligence-dominated economy. Diamandis’ ideas, UBI, developing a Curiosity Mindset, and identifying a person’s MTP could all benefit from programs receiving money from an AI surtax.
I am sure, other than point #1, most of you haven’t encountered these other sources of capital. That’s why I hope if you are budding entrepreneur, visiting this blog site, that you use the information below to help you get the funding to achieve your next moonshot.
Global crowdfunding has exploded onto the scene, and crowdfunding websites make it easy for anyone to market their ideas and get funded. The total worldwide volume hit $16.2 billion as of 2017, with 375 crowdfunding platforms in North America alone. The World Bank predicts that crowdfunding investments will be a $96 billion per year market in the Developing World by 2025.
Kickstarter, one of the most popular reward-based crowdsourcing platforms, has launched almost 400,000 projects, and over $3 billion has been pledged on the site. The most successful Kickstarter campaign to date, Pebble Time, raised over $20 million in 37 days, with $7.4 million in the first day alone. Even Oculus Rift, the product responsible for making VR a household name, was funded initially on Kickstarter.
Equity crowdfunding is also taking off tremendously, with worldwide volume exceeding $4 billion in 2016 and expected to grow $20 billion by 2020, surpassing worldwide angel capital.
What crowdsourcing does is democratize funding, allowing any good idea, regardless of its origin, to become realizable. As such, Goldman Sachs has described crowdfunding as “potentially the most disruptive of all the new models of finance.”
An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) or Token Generation Event (TGE) is a new fundraising tool from the cryptocurrency realm. In some ways, ICOs and TGEs are like crowdfunding campaigns, but instead of offering a product or shares of equity in a startup, companies offer “coins” (for ICOs) or “tokens” (for TGEs), which allow buyers to access blockchain-based software services. Rather than pitch to a venture capitalist to fund an idea, programmers may host a TGE and sell a fixed number of tokens to the open market (usually in exchange for Bitcoin or Ethereum). Consumers buy the tokens with the hope that, over time, the software or service will become widely used and increase the token’s value. This route is especially popular for companies that aim to create decentralized platforms because, by definition, no one owns these platforms or directly profits from them.
Nearly $2.3 billion has been raised to date in ICOs, with the large majority of that taking place in the first half of 2017 ($800 million in Q2 2017). In fact, in Q2 2017, ICOs outcompeted VC funding in virtually every regard as it relates to funding Blockchain projects (see chart).
Recently, an Ethereum startup and incubator called ConsenSys has been raising eyebrows in this exciting market. ConsenSys’s MTP is creating simplified and automated decentralized applications to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions and exchanges. They hope to spearhead this revolutionary idea into the mainstream. In September, the company launched a $50 million venture fund for startups working in blockchain technology.
I’ve noticed an uptick in funding to promising startups from Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). A source of over $6.59 trillion in assets, SWFs are investing in early-stage ventures that hopefully will yield outsized returns if the funded firms experience exponential growth. Globally, there were 42 SWF deals valued at some $16.2 billion in 2016 based on data from the Sovereign Wealth Lab research center at Madrid’s IE Business School.
The largest technology investment fund ever, Softbank Vision fund, is backed by two sovereign nations: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The $100 billion Softbank Vision Fund plans to invest over $1 billion in Uber when it goes public. The fund recently bought Boston Dynamics (the robotics company) from Alphabet.
In addition to the Vision Fund, Saudi Arabia has also made recent headlines with its Vision 2030 initiative which describes a prosperous and sustainable future for Saudi Arabia as the Kingdom prepares for new technologies to replace the oil market that the current economy relies upon. Saudi Arabia has announced plans to invest $1 billion in Virgin’s space tourism companies as just one of many SWF investments.
Other SWF examples include Ireland’s “Strategic Investment Fund” and Australia’s “Future Fund.” In fact, many countries are so convinced that the future belongs to powerful entrepreneurs with massively transformative purpose, that they are pooling together billions of dollars to help them go for it. They see the potential of exponential technology coming from do-it-yourself innovators, and they want a slice of the pie. Perhaps your startup could be the next to catch the imagination of an entire country.
