Everyone sucks at something.
In a baseball sense, that’s why “five tool” players are paid so well. They can not only hit for average, but they can also hit for power, run the bases with great speed, they can field with great skill, and throw long distances accurately. The five tool players are rare, and then when someone like Shohei Ohtani comes along of the six-tool variety (yes, he can pitch), we watch in awe.
Baseball is one way to look at the AI future that Mark Zuckerberg described this week in an excellent Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Zuckerberg crucially wrote that “As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less.” Yes, precisely.
In very few words, Zuckerberg laid out the meaning of AI for the individual. It’s not just about immense knowledge, analysis of everything, and term papers for students, it’s that it will make us all exponentially more valuable by doing and thinking for us in ways we can’t presently do or think.
Readers already know the genius of what was described in the previous paragraph. It can be found in corporations, on teams, and in families too. As Zenger Media CEO Richard Miniter once put it, corporations themselves are AI. Exactly.
Corporations are a combination of varied skills and intelligence on the path to enormous productivity. Teams are the same. No baseball team drafts all catchers, or power hitters, or pitchers, rather they piece together different skills.
Traveling back in time to the 18th century, Adam Smith’s commentary about the pin factory he visited was a centuries early look at the potential of man. We're only limited by our capacity to divide up work. One man working alone could maybe produce one pin per day, but ten men working together in specialized fashion could produce tens of thousands.
If working alone and required to meet all our needs, we would live lives of unrelenting drudgery. But by dividing up work with the world in such a way that our odds of doing what do we best increase, our living standards have risen to levels that people in Adam Smith’s time could never have contemplated. And it’s only going to get better.
See Zuckerberg yet again. It’s not lost on him as the head of a corporation that employs roughly 70,000 individuals that the genius of Meta is rooted in what 70,000 individuals working together can achieve. It’s a productivity marvel, but it also explains Zuckerberg’s optimism about what’s ahead.
Explicit in AI and in his commentary about how “each person will become more capable” is that in the AI future, everyone will figuratively acquire superhuman qualities. While work divided among humans has enabled enormous leaps throughout time, picture what the proverbial five – and yes – six-tool humans will accomplish while working together.
Corporations in such a scenario will be a marvel, so will globalized effort more broadly, but as Zuckerberg excitingly added in his piece, “Invention, not automation, will be the greatest contribution of superintelligence.” Absolutely.
Since AI is but another way of explaining what Oklahoma State professor Steve Trost describes as “aggregated intelligence,” it will soon enough reveal itself through countless AI-armed individuals pursuing the invariably solitary task of invention. The difference is that they will be operating with technologically granted skills the productive effect of which will give the impression of the individual working with thousands of people possessing all manner of skills.
What a future. We should look at the young, babies, and future babies with envy and awe. Life is so happy when we don’t suck.
