Jean-Charles Kurdali

What’s still important in the age of AI? Vision and verification. Prompting and polishing. Community and geography. Scarcity and cryptography. Physicality and resiliency. Vision is where you are going. AI can move fast in a direction but it needs direction. Vision means focusing on that direction. Verification is making sure the AI is doing what you want it to do. You can use AIs to critique each other, but you are the final critic. Prompting is articulating what you want in clear written (or spoken) English. Those with great vocabularies will do far better than those without. Polishing is realizing that AI often does it middle-to-middle, but not end-to-end. AI is a construction crane that can build much of the building, but often at the end you need human tweezers. Community is online and offline connectivity. It’s what stays roughly constant even as software becomes variable. Geography is the longitude and latitude that governs your laws. To first order the Internet is roughly uniform across the surface of the earth, but to second order it really is not. Scarcity is everything from physical scarcity (like robots and drones and houses and cars) to distribution scarcity. The hard-to-make atoms as distinct from the easily made bits. Cryptography is everything AI can’t do. LLMs can solve partial differential equations, but not discrete logarithms. The hard-to-fake bits as distinct from the easily faked bits. Physicality is where AI will truly shine. Robot task completions can often be more easily verified. The real world is the verifier of whether a box is on a table. It’s much harder to verify whether an essay is done. Resiliency is about cutting your burn rate, strengthening your community, and picking the right location (and allocation) to weather the dislocations ahead.