Think back to February 2020.
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.
Matt Shumer has written the post about this AI inflection point I wanted to write and send to friends, so I’m just gonna link to his and suggest that you read it. Hat tip: Toni.
The only thing I’d add is that there will be more demand for some of these things being automated, and tremendous consumer surplus created, so I think my view is a bit rosier than the tone this leaves you with.
