The Right Stuff
When AI can do white collar work, you start to wonder where you fit in. Technical expertise—e.g., understanding distributed systems, mastering convex optimization, building a financial model—used to pay a premium. That edge is evaporating as AI ramps up.
You can no longer afford to be a tool. If you’re merely an input-output machine turning coffee into code, you’re already automated. Maybe it’s mechanized functionaries all the way up, but I don’t think so. New opportunities emerge when people’s needs evolve and solutions gain power when they resonate with these needs. What this means is that the logically necessary next step for society is always a social fact, deriving from real human desires, and so by definition it will be recognized by humans first, not AI. Get yourself closer to the wellspring of new realities.
When you think about what you can do for the world, start with what you want. You might be tempted to lead with what other people seem to want, but then you’re only getting the low-hanging highly legible demands. To find the compelling opportunities, you need to be attuned at a spiritual level. That’s the only way to hear the call for change when it’s too early to be articulated. An obvious example is that software engineers know at a visceral level what could make their job easier and this has been the starting point for some great businesses—but there are so many more paths than just this one.
Opportunities arise from unfilled needs and the big ones can be felt by almost everyone. A better example to consider is the Deep Tech resurgence spearheaded by STEM bros who found B2B SaaS depressing and went looking for careers building real things, strengthening their country, and unlocking space travel. Their needs in the workplace are predictive, their malaise is the country’s malaise, and their creative ideas for lines of flight are compelling ideas for the masses, too—not just their fellow practitioners.
You might think this means that in the future everyone should be a founder. I don’t think so. When thinking about the future of AI, it’s helpful to realize that society has a fractal structure. The base case is a solo founder identifying a concrete need they’ve experienced and selling a solution into the market. This unfurls in two dimensions, into more abstract needs and more complex org structures. The fact that there will still be opportunities for founders in the future doesn’t mean you need to be a founder, because a whole supply chain of labor follows by induction. Similarly, you don’t need to limit your goals to simplistic desires. It’s OK if what you really need is something like a compelling adventure, a role in leadership, or cultural insight. Other people want these things, too.
Tom Wolfe wrote about “the right stuff"—that ineffable quality that made test pilots ready to climb into experimental aircraft and push into the unknown vastness of space. It wasn’t just technical mastery or raw courage that set them apart, but rather an alignment between the man and the moment. Opportunity is a dance and it yields to those who can hear the music. It’s not a solvable puzzle of progress, but rather a rendezvous with destiny. What made space exploration meaningful wasn’t the rockets reaching escape velocity—it was the man in the pilot’s seat, forever expanding the scope of what it is to be human. The same holds true today: AI cannot automate our self-actualization. It’s a tool to get there, but the frontier of human desire only becomes real when someone steps into it.