AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What?
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You've just been told you have superpowers. You've just been told you can have multiple employees for $200 a month. What do you do? If I was a young person today starting off my career, I would try to convince my parents to give me some money to harness a huge swarm of computers and see, like, can I spend $5,000 of compute productively? That's the challenge. We've been talking about a meme sort of in tech world for years now, the idea of, like, the one person billion dollar startup. Right? Yeah. Is this not how that happens? What we're describing is exactly how that happens. There's a new surp
Look. The apprenticeship might be dead, but the real work is beginning.
What happens when AI gives everyone the leverage of a team? In this episode, taken from Web three with a 16 z, Christian Catalini and Eddie Lazarin unpack what that means for work, startups, and ambition. Let's get into it.
Hi, everybody. We're here with Kristin Cattellini, who is the cofounder of LightSpark and founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab, as well as Eddie Lazarin. And we're here to talk about a new economics paper that Christian published called some simple economics of AGI. Christian, I think the title of this paper is slightly misleading in that it's actually not incredibly simple. It's more than 100 pages long, and there are many complex mathematical formula involved. Maybe some of the insights you've managed to distill down into a simple kind of framework for people to understand things. But over
Yeah. I would say it was born like probably many others at the same time out of a semi existential crisis. We're all grappling with the fast pace of progress and just how quickly everything is moving. I'm an optimist. So look at all of this and can see kind of at the end of the arc really amazing things. But the fundamental question was like, what are we going to do? What should we focus on? What's worth of our attention, effort, and time, especially in this phase where we still, I think, have a meaningful shot at influencing the trajectory and really the technology. So we wrote actually some
Even so you have managed to distill down the findings in a way that people can get a handle on pretty reliably well. You even have little short branded ways of understanding the existential crises that we all face, such as the Codifier's Curse and several other of these kinds of labels that you've invented to describe the world we're entering. Let me just ask you though, you said this stemmed from an existential crisis. How are you feeling psychologically? What is your state?
Great.
Are you sweating? Are you happy? You you feel good?
Absolutely. I think it was a long journey. It was many, many months of kind of thinking about some of these fundamental concepts. It came out, and I think my co authors do, with a feeling that, first of all, this is a technology that is under our control still at this point. Second, the upside, as I already kind of hinted at, is many orders of magnitude greater than what the doers would want you to believe. And third, I think there's a playbook. There's a playbook that all of us can look at. We can think about where are we adding value? What are the sort of things that we do within our job? Jo
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