 Perhaps the biggest nightmare is the booming, new industrial revolution, the displacement of millions of workers, the loss of a huge number of jobs. It's funny because everybody's like, oh, robots are selling all jobs. And I'm like, no, humans have been doing robot jobs. It's tragic that we're having humans perform such basic tasks all day. I think humans have such capabilities that they should be reserved for high-value things that only humans can do it. If a machine can do it, then the machine should do it. So I think that's what's going to happen. Just spend your entire day in flow state and do whatever you do best, and then a machine should take care of all the logistical work around that. Software engineer Flo Cravello is the founder and CEO of Lindy, which is part of the new artificial intelligence gold rush that could upend the US labor market. To better understand how that disruption will play out, it's worth looking at how the intersection of computing and telecommunications have already impacted how Americans spend their working hours. AI furthers what the venture capitalist Mark Andreessen has described as software eating the world. Even as the number of employed Americans grew by 16% from 2000 to 2021, people working as executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants fell by 66% because of tools like voicemail, calendar apps, web browsers, and dictation software. Lindy could drive that number down even further by creating an AI personal secretary that can book travel, take notes during meetings, and handle basic email correspondence. The long-term vision is to basically automate all knowledge work, so we really think of her as an AI employee of sorts. Over the same time period as the overall labor market grew, the number of travel agents plummeted by 70% thanks in part to direct-to-consumer booking sites. Now, tools like TripNote's AI can build a full travel itinerary without the hassle of price matching or spending hours reading up on whether the ancient Athens tour or the gourmet food tasting are the better use of an afternoon. The number of professional photographers in the U.S. has fallen by 41% since 2000 because of smartphones and ubiquitous digital cameras. Now, startups like Headshot Pro could drive that down with its AI-generated professional headshots, such as this one, which cost me $29 versus the roughly $700 that it cost to hire a human photographer here where I live in Washington, D.C. AI tools that already exist could automate 25% of the tasks American workers do, according to a recent report by Goldman Sachs, which will free up humans to do other things. The prediction that AI will put us all out of work is based on a fallacy, and we can expect total employment to continue rising even as technology wipes out specific jobs. It's a process of creative destruction to use the phrase of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, which explains why whole new industries emerge following the disappearance of ice cutters, blacksmiths, harness makers, wheelwrights, ditch diggers, weavers, holographists, hinsetters, lamp lighters, elevator operators, collectors, block keepers, rejectionists, milkman, and log drivers. In the process, we became profoundly richer. Technology frees up resources to create jobs that people in the past could never have imagined. And no, this time is not different. People mistakenly believe that there is a fixed amount of work to be performed in the economy. The reality of it is that human needs and wants are infinite. The lifestyle that you and I live is actually better than the lifestyle of Louis XVI. And we still want more. In the beginning of the 1900s, something like 90% of the active population were formed. Since then, we went down and very quickly to 5% of the active population or something like that. And yet we don't have massive employment very far from it in the U.S. Since 2000, factory automation has driven down manufacturing employment. Even though the U.S. is producing more stuff than ever before. On the other side of the ledger, software development has been one of the fastest growing professions since 2000, increasing by 143% and outpacing the growth of overall employment. That trend will probably continue. AI won't replace coders, but it will make it possible for the less technically sophisticated to draft more sophisticated applications. And this will enable founders to bootstrap an idea with minimal backing, similar to how cloud computing enabled tech startups to bring their products to market without their own backend infrastructure. Cravello predicts that there will be demand for software applications to fit every conceivable need as the economy moves toward more personalized everything. When you ask something to Linda, the way she performs the task, actually, is that she writes a little piece of code to perform the task for you. For example, if you say, hey, help me find 30 minutes with Bob next week. She's going to write a piece of code to be like, I'm going to look at your calendar. I'm going to pull availability. I'm going to compile them in an email. I'm going to send them to Bob and then wait for him to reply. So all of that is a mini piece of code. And I think that's amazingly interesting because I always compare it to the industrial revolution where it's like before the industrial revolution, certain goods like caps or pens were very expensive. One cap was probably of the order of like 100 or 500 dollars. Right. And after the revolution, these goods became so cheap that we started to have single use versions of them. And so, you know, we have like the red solo caps and like the big pens. And they're just so cheap that you can't even refill a big pen. It's just cheaper to buy a new one than to replace the ink. And so here it's the same thing. Historically, code has been very expensive. One app has cost of the order of $10,000 to $100,000. With the AI cognitive revolution, code is becoming so cheap that it can be disposable in single use. And so it costs of the order of one cent to build an application. And so effectively you're going to live in a world where Facebook mini applications are built for every little use case that you have throughout your day. And that's what it is doing effectively. If we think about generative AI right now, I can create a photo of, you know, Gandalf wearing a pink shirt in a silly hat in seconds. Alex Banks writes the newsletter through the noise and is the co-founder of Tribescaler, a tool that uses an AI algorithm to generate viral social media hooks. And all of these creative tasks that would take a Photoshop expert hours, I can now do with a very simple prompt. It is leveling the playing field for creative output where those who weren't creative, those who couldn't tell stories now can and those who were creative are only getting even better. I see AI as on demand intelligence, right? It's way cheaper and way faster than what you can get from humans. Just because tools like Amper can generate tracks like this one with a simple prompt of exciting, fast-paced and a little bit suspenseful, that doesn't mean that AI will put the nearly 10,000 Americans working as music directors and composers out of a job. Rather, it'll mean a lot more individually tailored music. Tools like Amper will do some of the work, but it will help composers work faster, better and free them up for higher level tasks. Radio GPT can pick songs, write scripts and have a realistic sounding voice read it, but the demand for human curated music won't disappear. The internet destroyed album sales, which were once a major source of revenue. But the number of professional musicians has still grown by 76% since 2000. Banks and Cruello are working on systems that utilize GPT-4 and artificial intelligence to do things that a generation ago would have been unimaginable. Look, we have the tools that augment human potential. So Tribe Scala in itself helps you go viral on Twitter, right? It's your AI writing assistant and personal collaborator. We use GPT-4 in really two settings. Number one is to help you write a great hook. So a hook is the number one factor in whether your piece of content succeeds or sits in the dark. And so the hook is that absolute critical factor. And so we use GPT-4 with fine-tuned prompts to use vetted viral structures to help you write better. Banks is also currently working on a project called Aloy, which he thinks will improve on note-taking applications that are being marketed as a second brain. If we look at Notion, it's a wonderful platform to store all of your personal knowledge and it's fairly good at retrieving with some search. It does a fairly good job, but it isn't entirely robust. And then you have other platforms, right on that capture phase such as, say, things three that is a wonderful quick capture tool on the desktop where I can hit control spacebar and I can immediately capture a thought. But then it's stored in a central repository and it's up to me to relocate that thought. What we're doing with Aloy is we're essentially going, okay, how can we complete that cycle for an individual and build a second brain for you so that you can access your creativity on demand. If I'm here and I'm wanting to write a tweet safe and six months ago, I had a conversation with my friend Natalie and we were chatting about AI and there was a wonderful insight that I got from that conversation and I added it to my second brain all on GPT-3 and its history. Now when I go to write that tweet and I start to write about GPT-3, all of a sudden what Aloy can do is it could resurface that idea for you dynamically. How we think about how that's going to propel productivity is really, really vast and something that I'm massively excited for. Change is scary. I think we're all about to see maybe the biggest change in human history. That sounds like hyperbole, but I really believe that. People are comparing AI to smartphones or the internet. I think it's Larry Summers who said it's much closer to the invention of fire or the wheel. Though the Goldman Sachs report predicts that 30% of industries won't be impacted by AI at all, some of these tools will free up human labor for service occupations like that of food which hasn't been fundamentally altered by computing and has grown nearly 37% since 2000 outpacing the growth of overall employment. The same goes for taxi drivers and personal trainers. As Cravella points out, we are hoarding too much human labor in existing industries, especially those controlled by the public sector. For example, the federal government wants to hire 87,000 new IRS agents when those same people could be reducing goods and services that other humans actually value. Healthcare administrators have grown in numbers since 2000 partly because of all the red tape that came with Obamacare. Technology might have already started shrinking the education labor force and new tools like course AI that can design syllabi are Cogni which offers one-on-one AI tutoring. We'll drive further productivity gains in the sector. Remaking how we work is a core part of every tech revolution and it's through this process that we've profoundly driven up our standard of living. Let the robots have their jobs.