AI and the Age of the Individual

People think AI is going to replace individuals and create gigantic trillion dollar megacorporations that will upend Google. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that rather than replacing individuals, recent advances in AI will empower them to make an impact on a scale matching some of the biggest businesses, research labs, and creative organizations of today. 

Why? What businesses and research labs and movie studios purchase with their cash flow is intelligence. Organizations large and small are responsible for coordinating the intelligence of individual employees together to make products, discover new knowledge, and create new works of art. 

AI pushes the cost of intelligence toward zero. And as this happens, domains of achievement that were previously unavailable to individuals and small teams—because they required the marshaling and coordination of a large amount of intelligence—suddenly open up.

If you want to understand what will happen when the cost of intelligence goes to zero, you should look at what people who can afford the currently high cost of intelligence do with it today. What they do with it today, will be what individuals will be able to do with AI tomorrow.

Let’s start with writers.

How this will work for writers

If you’re a writer today, you’ve got to do a lot to stay on top of your game. 

Take someone like Ryan Holiday. Ryan runs:

• A daily email called the Daily Stoic
• A Daily Stoic podcast
• A Daily Stoic YouTube channel
• A daily email called the Daily Dad
• Oh and he's also written something like 5 books in the last 2 years
• (I honestly think I’m missing a few things here—he has another newsletter on book recommendations that comes out monthly)

How does he do it? Well, first, an insane work ethic. Second, he has a very well-established content format and pipeline: he reads a lot, he takes a lot of notes on what he reads, and he’s quite good at translating little bits of reading into short, punchy essays that become newsletters or book chapters. These bits of writing then get translated into different formats: YouTube videos, a podcast, and more.

Third, and most importantly, although he’s involved in everything that goes out, Ryan doesn’t do all of it himself. He has writers on staff that help him research and flesh out ideas and outlines into full-fledged posts. He has video editors and producers that help him translate his written pieces into videos. And he has podcast editors who help him turn his writing into audio. 

If you want to have a level of output equal to Ryan, you need to not only have his rare combination of drive, writing skills, and intelligence. But you also have to have the resources and reach to recruit and pay the team that helps you output so much writing consistently, and then translate it into new formats.

AI tools change this dynamic considerably.