Stephen talks about how embracing AI is the best way for the world to head into the future. It will be brighter and more creative.

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Dave Young:
Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here, with Stephen Semple. And Stephen told me that today he wanted to talk about AI, and I’m just assuming that the hammer’s about to drop and that this podcast is now just going to be replaced by some kind of chatbot. Is that what you had in mind?

Stephen Semple:
How do we know it hasn’t already been?

Dave Young:
Well, gosh. Good point.

Stephen Semple:
At the core of this podcast is this idea that we need to be looking outside our space and looking for opportunities and kind of being open to things.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
I wanted to put a little bit different look on what I think the AI opportunity is and bring a little bit of historical perspective to a couple of things. So that’s kind I wanted to do here. So here’s the interesting part. Let’s go back a hundred years.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
We’re in the 1920s. We’re in that period leading up to World War II. The Industrial Revolution is really getting going at this point. And if there was an economist out there looking forward and looking at the Industrial Revolution, here’s one way that they could look at it. At the time, one out of three people worked directly in agriculture. A third of the people were farmers and did not support agriculture, farmers. And today, it’s like 1.5%. It’s like out of a hundred people, there’s a couple of people who are farmers. None of us even meet farmers anymore.

So if you were an economist and you called that correctly, you would say, “Wait a minute, the Industrial Revolution is going to wipe out one of the largest employers in the economy,” it would be really easy to make the call, the economy is going to be a disaster. Our biggest employer is going to go from 30% to 1.5% of the workforce. So it’d be an easy way to call the Industrial Revolution. And it did work out that way, except, it didn’t.

Here’s the other part that’s interesting according to a study by MIT, now, this one doesn’t go back to 1920, it goes back to 1940, 60% of the jobs that we do today did not exist in the 1940s. In the vast majority of the work that we do today, almost 2/3 did not exist. So the economy created a whole pile of new jobs. But here’s the interesting thing, it’s not just high-tech jobs, it’s ancillary jobs to that. So for example, heating and air conditioning repairmen did not exist in the 1940s.

Dave Young:
Sure.

Stephen Semple:
While there was plumbing, a lot of homes did not have indoor plumbing. Being a plumber was not a huge thing in the 1940s. So it’s not just these changes bring, you got to look at, “Oh, well, what are the jobs in AI?” there are going to be all sorts of opportunities that are going to present themselves that we haven’t even dreamt of or thought of that we got to keep our eye open too.

Dave Young:
I agree with that. I agree. I’ve not dived in headfirst into ChatGPT and all of the other AI things like so many of us, many of our Wizard of Ads partners have done. And I’m not sure what it is about it that when I have dabbled, it’s been a pretty good experience, pretty eye-opening. I’ve got some ideas, things like that. I’m not going to ask it to write anything for me, but I am asking it for some ideas, and it’s pretty darn good at coming up with some ideas.

Stephen Semple:
I find it good for first drafts of something. So again, that’s looking for ideas. Or sometimes, it’s I got this thing and I want to change it. So for presentations, I’ve got this idea and I want to turn this idea into a presentation, and it has to be a five-minute presentation. I want to follow this arc. It can give, again, that first draft where I can then look at it and dig into it and make some changes to it. So I’ve definitely been using it, there’s going to be opportunities of being an AI coach and all this other stuff, but those are on the nose ones.

When we take a look at brand new technologies that have come in, whether it’s the commercialization of flight, which created a huge opportunity for Marriott, and the opportunity Marriott was to provide food to the passengers on planes. So many of the jobs are not the ones that are on the nose, it’s ancillary things that this technology then creates.

Dave Young:
Sure, yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Right? That’s actually where most of the work is. The explosion in the airline industry created all these opportunities that were outside the airline industry, which were hotels and resorts and providing food to the airlines and that were outside of the creation of that technology. And so, what I’m suggesting people do is don’t just think about AI, yes, think about AI from the standpoint of how can I use AI, think about AI from the standpoint of what’s maybe some of my opportunities on AI, but also recognize, the biggest opportunities are going to be on a fringe, around it that we probably haven’t even imagined yet.

Dave Young:
Yeah, I agree. It’s hard to imagine the things that you’re talking about right now, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
In a way, it’s sort of like when Jeff Bezos decided he was going to start selling some books on this little website called Amazon, and nobody knew the revolution that he was going to start even things like distribution and having enough warehouses within miles of people that you could start ordering things that would be delivered the same day, not just books. There’s this butterfly effect of new things like that that we can’t envision what that’s going to mean.

Stephen Semple:
Absolutely. Well, it’s hard to believe that the iPhone was launched in 2007.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
It’s not 20 years old. And think about all of the opportunities and changes. It was 2000 when the first e-commerce, well, I think it was actually 1999 the first e-commerce transaction happened, but let’s say 2000.

Dave Young:
Sure. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
E-commerce was not a thing before 2000. And it’s funny, I remember back, my oldest daughter when she was in middle school, and we were sitting down with a counselor, and the counselor was going through helping her figure out what she should do in high school because you’ve got to pick the right things in high school because it’s the right things in high school that set you up for getting the right degree in university, and getting the right degree in university sets you up for work. And Crystal was cratering at that moment.

And I ended up having to look at the counselor going, you are trying to pretend that you know what’s going to be in demand 15 years from now. Let’s recognize we have no idea.

But here’s the key to this, I think, it’s really hard to be creative and open and able to seize these opportunities when you approach it from a place of fear, very, very, very hard.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
I was reading about Nintendo. Nintendo is one we’re probably going to do in the future. And Nintendo, they’ve gone through a couple of difficult periods. They actually gave their creative team bonuses even in difficult periods because what they’ve recognized is if you’re in this place of fear and worry, it’s hard to be creative, the mind just… And there’s all sorts of physiology. We know that the parts of the brain don’t get as much blood flow and all those other things. So if we get fearful about AI, we cannot create opportunities.

Dave Young:
Yeah. I love that story about Nintendo because the gut reaction from most companies is we start cutting the creatives because we can’t put a dollar figure exactly on how much time they spend on our payroll versus a return on that.

Stephen Semple:
Right, yes.

Dave Young:
It’s like high schools, “The budget is hurting, so let’s cut out all the creative programs, let’s cut out the band, let’s cut out the art program. And let’s put more money into…” I was going to say football, might as well, but that’s not creating the kind of people that are going to find something revolutionary. And I don’t know, I’m just rambling now, Stephen, rescue me.

Stephen Semple:
No, but there’s an important point you’re making here. So let’s even tie it back to AI. AI, as it exists today, and again, we don’t know what it’s going to be five years from now, but as exists today, AI is not creative, it’s iterative, it’s predictive. Now, it can create some pretty cool things because of that, and if you put the right constraints on it, it can be interesting. But true creativity, seeing those brand new ideas that don’t exist, it’s not there yet.

Dave Young:
It can show you all the things that have been done before.

Stephen Semple:
It can show you all the things that have been done before and all the things that have worked before. And it also can’t tell you why something has failed, it can just say it failed. And it could tell you other people’s interpretation of why it failed.

So I think what’s going to end up happening is true creativity is going to become more and more valuable moving forward. And to stay in that creative state, we can’t fear it. And let’s face it, it is inevitable that’s going to come. We are going to have to create rules around it. There’s going to have to be new ways of looking at things and copyrights and all that other stuff. Yes, I agree with all that. And we are going to need some legislative environment around it, I agree with all that. But we can’t fear it. What we have to do is we have to embrace it.

And then, what we also have to do is recognize there’s going to be a boatload, unbelievable boatload of new opportunities created both directly from it and on the fringe all around it that we have never thought of or contemplated before. And it’s approaching it with that mindset that I believe will create success and opportunities and growth and a better economy and all those things.

Going back 100 years ago, agricultural jobs were wiped out, but 2/3 of the jobs we are doing today did not exist. That’s where the opportunity is. What’s the 2/3 that’s going to now start to happen as we go through this evolution in our economy? And that’s just how I want people to think about it. Just don’t fear it because that will kill us. We need us to all be creative about it, to create that opportunity.

Dave Young:
Good point, Steve. I feel better about it already.

Stephen Semple:
There you go. And it’s just this weird philosophical thing, but I think it’s important.

Dave Young:
Well, and I think if you’re going to understand it and try to keep up with it, dabble. Set yourself up with a ChatGPT account or find some other AI and play around with it. In fact, one of the best ways to find out what it can do is to ask it what it can do for you.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, that’s actually very interesting.

Dave Young:
Right?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
Because you get some interesting answers. And I think it’s worth spending some time. And honestly, there are probably people who have never played with it before that are going to come up with something that’s even cooler than a lot of people who are already just becoming great AI trainers. Because I feel like the people who are becoming great AI trainers are not necessarily the creatives out there right now because the creatives are a little bit scared. But once they start figuring out things that they can do to bolster creativity or to use an AI in a way that is creative, I think that’s exciting times.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it is an exciting time. It is a very exciting time. All right, awesome.

Dave Young:
Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:
That’s just what I wanted to share. I think it’s important in terms of seeing those opportunities and embracing this technology that is, it is an inevitable that’s going to occur, so let’s figure out how to use it.

Dave Young:
All right, well, I’m looking forward to the next time we talk.

Stephen Semple:
All right, thanks, David.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at theempirebuilderspodcast.com

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