Alex Wissner-Gross

The bottles of anti-hydrogen and hydrogen at the Starships and in the center of Starships in Star Trek, we have those now.

We're running out of Star Trek technologies to commercialize.

Well, I think for most people, I'll construe the question as, say, what should a, quote unquote, typical American worker, quote unquote, worker of employment age, quote unquote, so a lot of caveats and conditionals here do if they're concerned about technological unemployment due to AI.

And I think all one needs to do is read the headlines to know that there are two popular strategies in the zeitgeist right now to handle that.

So strategy one, I'll give what's in the zeitgeist, the cliche answers first before I give my own answer.

Strategy number one, switch from knowledge work to manual labor for a few years.

So there are a lot of people who are switching from so-called white collar jobs to so-called blue collar jobs.

Like a plumber.

A plumber, an electrician, an HVAC technician.

I don't know.

I don't have a perfect crystal ball, but I do know that there is enormous demand for electricians to do the data center build out, for example.

A shortfall, allegedly, of hundreds of thousands of electricians in this country needed to help build out this AI data center, infrastructure, tower, to whatever comes next.

That's strategy one in the zeitgeist.

Strategy two is launch an AI startup.

Everyone becomes an entrepreneur.

There are a thousand different, probably 10,000 different labor categories waiting to be automated and industries waiting to be driven in terms of underlying costs down to zero through AI automation.

Both

sort of knowledge work oriented categories, like pick parts like accounting, not to cast shade on accountants, or physical manual work in the next few years as humanoid robots come online.

That's the second half of the cliche answer.

I don't think either of these is a long-term strategy.