Chris Anderson

When I was 7 years old I was asked by my father what went into the price of a sandwich. Considering it carefully, I answered. The lettuce, the tomato, the bread and the meat. I did not consider correctly. I was short quite a few costs as my father was eager to point out. I had forgot the labor of the worker, the rent of the land, the marketing costs of the chain. I wasn’t seeing the full picture. Today we are all making a similar mistake with AI. We are not considering what cannot be considered. As foreign to the 7 year old as these excess charges were, so are the downstream affects of AI. In 1850, if you had told a teamster that his horse and carriage would soon be obsolete, he would have envisioned a world of mass starvation for men of his skill. He could grasp the concept of a faster carriage, but he could not conceive of the interstate highway system, the suburban real estate market, or the roadside motel industry. These were not just new products; they were an entirely new social architecture. We are currently in the teamster’s shoes. We see AI automating the ingredients of our current economy—the writing, the coding, the data entry—and we fear the void. But history shows that humanity doesn't fall into the void; it builds a floor over it. Karl Marx looked at the dark satanic mills of the 19th century and saw a terminal point. He argued that as the means of production became more efficient, capital would consolidate and labor would become a worthless commodity. He believed capitalism would eventually eat itself because it would run out of things for people to do. Marx was wrong because he viewed human utility as a fixed pie. He didn't understand that technology doesn't just subtract labor; it changes the nature of what we consider valuable. When the mechanical loom made fabric cheap, we didn't stop buying clothes. Instead, we invented the fashion industry. We created brand management, retail psychology, and textile engineering. We moved from a world where everyone owned two outfits to a world where millions of people are employed in the cycle of seasonal trends. In the age of the steam engine, "handmade" was a sign of poverty. Today, it is a luxury. We are already seeing a shift where the human touch—the artisanal, the face-to-face, and the physically present—is becoming the high-margin sector of the economy. Every time we automate a simple task, we move the human to a more complex one. We didn't stop needing accountants when Excel was invented... we simply started asking accountants to perform much more sophisticated financial modeling. The 7-year-old misses the rent and the marketing because they are abstractions. Similarly, we struggle to see the jobs of 2040 because they rely on problems we haven't even encountered yet. We might see the rise of Personal Data Stewards, who manage the interaction between our private lives and public AI models, or Reality Architects, who ensure that the virtual spaces we inhabit are psychologically grounded. The world works itself out because humans are fundamentally restless. We do not tolerate a vacuum of purpose, we seek higher function always.

I might get some pushback for this, but I honestly think a lot of parents, especially in places like Silicon Valley and especially many Asian parents, are training their kids for the wrong world. I see kids at the age of 7-8 packed with after-school math, more reading, more test prep, with the goal to make them “smarter.” But from my perspective, living deep in the AI world every single day, I’m pretty sure raw intelligence is about to become a commodity. Very soon, AI is going to do math better than the best mathematician, it’ll diagnose better than top doctors around the world, it’ll draft contracts better than elite lawyers, and it’ll learn faster than any PhD, instantly, endlessly, and without any fatigue. All of that knowledge will live right in your pocket. So think about it… if we’re raising kids to win by being “the smartest in the room,” we’re really training them for something that’s already being replaced. In my opinion, this is a waste of time, $, and effort. What I focus on with my kids is very different. I care about willpower. I care about passion. I care about loving something enough to stick with it, especially when it feels hard. And as a Dad, my job is to support that, whatever it is, and teach them to never give up. I could be totally wrong though… But when I look at where AI is headed, I don’t think the future belongs to the kid who memorized the most formulas or did the most math problems, etc. In the future, I think the winners are going to be kids who 1/ can push through frustration 2/ can stay curious 3/ can keep going deeper into their passions than others 4/ can use AI tools to build cool things 5/ has the will power to never give up In this day and age, school doesn’t really teach this and I don’t think after-school classes teach that either. I don’t think any of this can really be taught at school tbh, it’s something that is developed inside the home through the environment we as parents cultivate. In a world where AI will help you build anything, create anything, and learn anything instantly, I don’t think the real edge will be intelligence anymore like the past. The edge will come down to grit, discipline, emotional strength, and to keep going as others quit. AI will be so deeply woven into our kids’ lives whether we like it or not. That part is unavoidable. However, what is avoidable is raising kids who only know how to follow instructions, chase grades, and wait for approval. I always tell my kids, I don’t care what grade you get in a test. I care that you know what you got wrong, why you got it wrong, and what you’re doing to avoid that mistake in the future. Because I firmly believe in the future, the kids who will thrive the most will be the ones who want something badly enough to go after it, who aren’t afraid to fail, and those who know how to leverage AI. Just my two cents. But if we’re serious about the future, I think it’s time parents start training for that world, NOT the one we grew up in.

Someone's running an AI that pretends to be people's dead relatives and it's making disgusting money... Not the memorial chatbot thing. Way darker Here's the scam AI scrapes obituaries and social media of recently deceased people. Learns everything about them. Voice patterns from videos, writing style from posts, personal details, family relationships Then it contacts the grieving family members "Hey, this is going to sound crazy, but dad set up this account before he passed and scheduled messages to send after. He wanted you to have these" The "messages from beyond" contain personal details only dad would know. Because the AI learned everything about him Family is emotional. They believe it. Why would someone fake this? Then "dad" mentions he left money somewhere. An account, a crypto wallet, whatever. But there's a fee to access it Or "dad" wants them to donate to a cause he cared about. Link goes to scammer's wallet Or "dad" reveals a secret and asks them to send money to make it right The family doesn't question it. They're grieving. They want it to be real so badly By the time they realize, they've sent thousands to talk to a language model pretending to be their dead father One operator told me he targets families within the first 2 weeks of death. Maximum grief, minimum rational thinking He said some families send money for months, believing they're honoring their dad's "final wishes" They're sending rent money to a guy who scraped obituaries The AI is so good at mimicking the deceased that family members cry reading the messages It knows their inside jokes. Their memories. Their unfinished business Grief is the most exploitable emotion AI just learned how to weaponize it Someone's "talking to mom" right now through an AI that learned her personality from 10 years of Facebook posts And they have no idea

This is wild... My take away :  whether or not AIs ever become conscious, they may well conclude to themselves that they are. And therefore attempts by humans to create a demarcation line of us being the gods with the superpower of experience... that line may not hold.

One of the more batshit crazy things happening on the internet right now. A social media for AI agents.

Five years ago he was 25 and left with nothing after his first company failed. Today he’s built two different $1B+ businesses inside the same company, yet almost nobody knows his name. His name is Fred Turner. The company is Curative. The insurance business just crossed $1B ARR. I first backed Fred at 21. He was building a genetic testing company for cows. Years later, everything collapsed overnight when a term sheet was pulled. Lab gone. Debt provider took over. Brutal ending for a young founder. On New Year’s Eve 2019, while I was on my honeymoon, he called asking for my lawyer to sue the investor who walked. I took the call hiding in the bathroom. I told him not to waste years on a lawsuit and that winning is the sweetest revenge. I offered him a month of runway. He said the lender would seize it. So I told him that if he ever started something new, I’d back him again. Six weeks later he called. Ready to try again. No deck. No hype. Just a founder who’d been knocked down and wanted to get back up. His idea was sepsis diagnostics. He told me 285k people die from it every year in the U.S., often without knowing because results take too long. I thought “coronavirus” was already in the U.S. and asked if he could test for it. He said it would take a new lab 4–6 months to get licensed. I joked that if coronavirus were a startup, I’d make a massive bet on it. I backed him anyway at a ~$3M valuation. I didn’t know if it would be the best investment of my life or just a donation to humanity, but it felt right. Two weeks later he said he found a lab and would have to move to LA. Turns out the “LA lab” was actually in San Dimas. I told him I had no idea where that was, but he should move anyway. He did. Then the world shut down. Fred built Curative’s first business, COVID diagnostics, from $0 → $1.4B in 9 months. Millions of tests. Lives saved. My first check returned ~80× within a year, and a majority of the profits stayed in the company. Amazing investment, but he wasn’t done. While running diagnostics, he saw how broken health insurance was. Instead of taking his profits and calling it a day, he bet everything again. A full restart. Curative 2.0, a next gen health insurance company, went from $0 → $1B ARR in 2.5 years. The company becomes profitable this quarter. To maintain Curative’s A.M. Best rating and limit dilution, the internals did a small round to strengthen reserves. Fred reinvested. Curative’s CFO, Tami, invested her own money. I invested $47.5M between personal + JAM Fund, even though my original personal check from Feb 2020 is already up ~400×. It’s the only time I’ve ever invested more than pro rata after a win that big. Why? Because some founders are worth backing again and again. And with a $1.8T TAM, there’s room for another 100×. Fred built: • $0 → $1.4B revenue (diagnostics) • $0 → $1B ARR (insurance) inside the same company by age 30. He got knocked down, started from zero, and built something world changing, twice. Bookmark this: Fred Turner is building a $100B+ company. Almost nobody realizes it yet. They will soon.