When AI Frees Us, Humans Must Step Up

In edition #10:

• Insights from this week’s Fortune AI Brainstorm in San Francisco. This was my third year, and it always delivers.

• From the archive: my talks at the last 2 Fortune AI events.

• I’d love to hear your thoughts! As ever, get in touch at [email protected] or simply respond to this email.

When AI Frees Us, Humans Must Step Up: Notes from Fortune Brainstorm AI

At Fortune Brainstorm AI this week, serial founder Elias Torres described his vision for his new venture: a $1B company with fewer than 100 employees. What caught my attention wasn't the efficiency - it was his insistence on being the only email contact for customers. As AI handles the routine, humans aren't becoming less essential - they're being called to step up in more demanding ways.

This was a recurring theme: Torres's first non-engineering hire? A lawyer brought in for critical subject matter expertise. In a company augmented by AI and running lean, every employee must be agile and adaptable - this same lawyer also handles HR and operations. With AI handling routine tasks, humans need both deep expertise and the flexibility to work beyond traditional role boundaries.

As we started to explore in last week's post, the real challenge isn't technical - it's human. While technical barriers like energy consumption will evolve (from today's high-energy ChatGPT queries to future fusion possibilities), the fundamental hurdle is about attitude and adaptability.

The investment panel revealed where the real opportunity lies: in the secondary effects that AI enables. Top investors suggested starting with imagining what could be possible - ubiquitous care at zero cost, or perfect learning regardless of location - then working backwards to implementation. The crucial question becomes: what will people and organizations do with all that freed capacity?

This evolution demands new economic models that ensure humans benefit from AI's growth. Companies like ProRata AI, Hour One, and Eleven Labs are building infrastructure for what I call the virtual human economy - where our digital extensions work for us, not the other way around. When creators are fairly compensated for their contributions to AI systems, it creates a virtuous cycle: humans are incentivized to feed their best creative work into the ecosystem, which makes AI more capable, which in turn frees humans to be more imaginative.

When Codium enables 40% of code to be AI-written, or Nova AI automates decade-long processes, they're creating waves of efficiency. But as Torres pointed out, "AI doesn't enslave us - software has." Now that AI is breaking those shackles, the real value lies in what humans will do with their newfound freedom - the cascade effects driven by human imagination and newly available resources.

Find below:

1. From the archive: my Fortune Brainstorm AI talks from 2022 and 2023- watch here and here.

2. Hot off the press: my podcast conversation with the Open Data Science AI podcast about the virtual human economy listen here.

Quote of the Week

Get in Touch

I’d love to hear from you! Reach me at [email protected] or by responding to this email.