Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. He has created a musical piece titled “Opportunity Prep” for you to enjoy while reading this column.
Last week, I discussed how compounding crises can create compounded opportunities and gave examples, but I also pointed out that the rate of change is more rapid now than ever before.
The ice age took tens of thousands of years to come on. The transition from the start of agriculture to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution society took roughly 10,000 years. Once industrialization began, it took about 200 years to fully develop, dramatically accelerating productivity, population growth, urbanization, and energy use. Then, the digital revolution, where information processing became widespread, has taken roughly 50 years; in other words, the information shift has gone from spark to saturation in a single lifetime. Each revolution is shorter and more intense than the last.
The modern AI Revolution has been going on for a little more than a decade, and ChatGPT did not become available until 2022. We are only in the third year of widespread large language models! This revolution is much faster than the last ones. It is so much faster that, although there will be many new opportunities, it will be difficult to be reactionary and effective. I was a Teamster in a Pepsi Cola factory when I was 19, and there was not a single job that I could not learn to do in a day, most even in a few minutes, but in this current revolution it takes time to learn new skills.
My colleagues and I have been exploring artificial intelligence for the last two years and have probably spent a few hundred hours each learning weaknesses and strengths. I am sure that how people use artificial intelligence will vary greatly depending on who the person is and what they are trying to do. Because most of us will need to become comfortable using artificial intelligence, it is time to start because it will take more than a day to learn.
And, if you expect to earn a living in the future, you had better become comfortable with using artificial intelligence. This requires preparation. Without this preparation, you will not likely be able to take advantage of the opportunities that arise.
Fortunately, getting experience using a large language model has become extremely easy. Most of my friends have experimented with several of them. Most of us only have one paid subscription, not necessarily the same one. Some of us have changed subscriptions from one LLM to another over the last year or two. Many of us will likely end up with multiple subscriptions. If you think spending $20 a month on a subscription to a large language model sounds expensive but you are spending over $100 a month on a cable TV subscription, think again. The cable TV subscription will not prepare you for the future. The large language model subscriptions such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Claude, and a slew of other ones coming onto the market right now are going to be invaluable, not necessarily for what you can get from it today but for how you will learn to use it tomorrow.
It will be as important as knowing how to drive a car—it might even be the way you drive a car.
Learning to drive a car took me the same amount of time as driving from home to the driver’s ed school. I thought my father would be driving me there, but instead he told me to get into the driver’s seat and drive there, and by the time I got there, I knew how to drive. Learning how to drive a car or to work in a factory is trivially easy for an educated and coordinated person.
Learning how to use artificial intelligence best is going to be more difficult. I am an engineer and a physicist, as are many of my friends. We have taken to using AI easily, but it is still taking us hundreds of hours to understand the ins and outs of this phenomenally powerful tool and to be able to use it at a high level. I suggest you spend a few hours a week playing around with a free AI model. Pretend it’s a new television program you want to watch, where you can easily blow several hours and make no investment in your future.
Anyone who is an athlete knows that you have to start moving in the direction of what you intend to do before you have to do it. Anyone who wants to have a career that requires skills will have to take some time to gain those skills. You do not need to enter a Ph.D. program or a graduate school to get your feet wet with AI. All you have to do is get a free account by providing an email, start playing around and discussing it with your friends, and share what you are learning. Don’t make the mistake of saying AI has nothing to do with me. Unless you are retired, and you have stopped growing and learning, and even then, it has something to do with you. It is the most powerful tool ever created.
I do not think it matters what you do, as long as you get your feet wet. Every writer I know has begun to play around with AI. Every photographer I know has started to play around with AI. Unfortunately, many musicians I know have not yet followed suit. Whoever you are and whatever you do, there will be new opportunities for you in the future. You will need to be proactive, not just reactive. Because it will take some time to be comfortable with artificial intelligence, I advise you to start today.
