Few outside of tech twitter are truly grasping the pace at which things are accelerating. It is as if a select few people in the world are seeing the proverbial asteroid hurtling towards us. We are marveling at it with wide eyed wonder. Some of us are imagining the second order consequences. Most of us, not really. Our way of life, what we do to make a living in particular will go through a breathtaking, dramatic change in the next 3-5 years. There is no glide path there, likely a lot of creative destruction instead. For those of us at tech twitter who have been witnessing this tsunami slowly gathering steam since Nov 30th, 2022, it will be less of a shock. But for majority of the people outside of this bubble, well, they are in for a shock of their lifetimes. White collar jobs as we know it will go through a complete and irreversible transformation over the next 3-5 years. Blue collar jobs will go through the same process, but we are 7-10 years out for that to play out. Universal Basic Income (UBI) will be forced upon us, whether we like it or not. Here’s why? Businesses will resort to AI agents at a tiny fraction of the $50T human labor market. Not because it’s the next shiny toy. But because it will be a matter of survival due to competitive dynamics. Governments will have to take action to stay in power. We often hear about the thesis around how cost of intelligence and energy will trend towards zero as AI truly flexes its muscle in the real world. Few understand the second order consequence of what this really means. Casually speaking, oil is a $2T asset class. And yes, simply thinking from first principles, humans will demand and consume more and more energy as it gets cheaper and cheaper. There is no upper limit to intelligence as the asset class. Without intelligence, we would not be here. Can’t put a price to that. Our whole world will undergo a massive restructuring. Millions of jobs will be made obsolete and UBI will be necessary to act as a counterbalance to natural, capitalistic tendencies of man. What remains to be seen is how does humanity handle a UBI world which is likely going to still be very lopsided in favor of the uber rich and powerful. Those humans closest to power will continue to thrive, and that’s going to be a minority in a centralized AGI setting. The biggest paradox to solve for white collar workers will be exactly what Reid Hoffman prophesied - “The paradox of the AI era is this: as today’s models improve, requiring less and less from us, we will need to demand more from ourselves. We must always insist on situating ChatGPT and its successors as our collaborative partners, not our replacements. We must continue to figure out how to keep human creativity, human judgment, and human values at the center of the processes we devise to work with these new AI tools, even as they themselves grow more and more capable” If the white collar workers don’t solve this paradox, the blue collar workers are done for. Why? Because within 7-10 years we will have robots capable of doing every single task that a blue collar worker can do, under an annual cost of $1000. When that happens, white collar and blue collar workers will be in the same boat. A complete and utter loss of meaning of life in a world which could be very inequitable. As a die hard optimist, I want to resist this future. There is a version of this future that could be exciting and full of endless, hopeful possibilities. To get there, we will need to start thinking about how to solve the AI paradox. We would have to solve it by 2027 the latest. Godspeed, and happy accelerating.