I sit on a school board, which means I am occasionally asked what children should be learning, and I have been giving an answer I no longer believe. The answer was: learn to code. Learn the technical thing, because the technical thing is where the leverage is. I have said this at dinner tables, to nephews, to parents who wanted reassurance, and I said it with real confidence because for twenty five years it was simply true. It was true for me. ...
The usual version of the abundance story goes like this. AI gets good. Companies build robots. The robots are expensive and narrow at first, so only the big players can afford them, and those players pull further ahead while everybody else has a difficult decade. Then, at some point, the robots start building robots. Curve goes vertical. Everything gets cheap. Prices fall, not because money became scarce but because supply became absurd, and we all sit around trying to work out what to do with ourselves. ...
Every Saturday, while our sons are busy with their own activities, a friend and I go for a walk. The topic changes each week: sometimes food, sometimes cricket, sometimes geopolitics, sometimes nothing at all. This week it was AI. We quickly agreed on the obvious part: AI concentrates power. Faster than any technology before it. The people who control the models, the compute, and the data will wield influence on a scale that democratic institutions were never designed to balance. ...