Citizen entrepreneurs

A friend of mine, an enterprise architect at a large Swiss energy group, answers the tumult in between with the observation that the same tools that threaten jobs make citizen entrepreneurs possible. An ordinary person can use AI to identify a business opportunity, use AI to build the business, and use AI to operate it. The barrier was never only money; it was the ten different competences a business needs on day one, and those are now available by the hour. The operating half is already true for infrastructure, where one person can now run what used to take a team, as I argued in How AI Makes Bare Metal Viable Again. He took his own idea seriously enough to build a business idea factory, a system that generates and evaluates opportunities. About a week before we talked, someone else announced a project with the same shape on Hacker News, which he took as confirmation rather than competition.

I find it the most hopeful reading of the window, and the one with the most work in it. It assumes the capability really is democratised, which I believe, and it assumes people will take it up, which is the part the window is for.