21 actions you can take now if you believe in AI acceleration
assume for a moment that the world will look unrecognizable in 10 years
what would you do differently starting today?
most of my friends in tech are very aware of how quickly AI is accelerating. the speedup has been evident for years to those paying attention, but over the last year the probability of real, world-changing takeoff happening soon has increased dramatically
now, for the first time, a large number of people outside of tech (aka normal people) are starting to become aware
the world is going to look very different 5 years from now. it may be unrecognizable in 10
once you internalize that, there is one natural question:
“so… what do i do now?”
if you radically change your view of the future, it makes sense to change your behavior in the present
i’ve been thinking about this question for years, and over the past few months i’ve written variations of my thoughts to friends and family who’ve asked this question. i decided to aggregate some of my ideas and conclusions and put them in a list
here they are:
investing
- invest directly in AI proliferation (Tesla, Nvidia, Palantir, Google, Anthropic & OpenAI if you have access, etc)
- invest in AI-adjacent exponential industries: Robotics, Biotech, Crypto, Space
- invest in the supply chain: compute, energy, materials
- you should not be contributing to 401ks or Roth IRAs if you're below 50 years old - avoid locking capital into 30–40 year retirement vehicles that depend on a predictable world and are +EV with a long time horizon but -EV if you take out the money sooner. prefer liquidity over multi-decade tax optimization. it's highly likely these will be irrelevant by the time they mature
general finance
- pull forward future cash flows wherever possible - you generally want to take on debt you'd have to repay in the future for cash today
- lock in fixed-rate debt wherever you can
- examples: don't pay off your student loans faster than you are required to, take out long-dated mortgages - in general, perceive debt 10+ years into the future as likely nonexistent, and then operate rationally from there
- avoid annuities and long-duration financial products dependent on stability
- reduce reliance on institutions that assume slow / linear change
career
- plan for most knowledge work and physical labor to be heavily automated within 5 years
- do not start law school, medical school or other very long training setups now expecting a financial ROI
- become extremely close to AI systems (builder or power user)
- build distribution (audience, leverage, brand) instead of collecting credentials
- work where exponential change is visible up close
lifestyle & time horizon
- stop planning your life with a 30-40 year time horizon
some examples of how to apply this in practice:
- don’t center your 20s and 30s around retirement age quality of life
- don’t over index on distant longevity optimization - you don’t have to worry about cancer / aging / long term effects of high blood pressure or anything you would "pay for" over a decade into the future. basically the "future health debt" associated with the risks of nicotine / sun exposure / alcohol / smoking / most long term unhealthy habits will likely not be encountered
- become comfortable abandoning outdated plans
- buy a house near family soon - you’ll probably want to own land and be with those you have the closest relationships with. not a huge change to most people's planning, but probably do this sooner rather than later
- generally do not plan beyond 5-10 years - the world will look so different that the planning will likely be irrelevant
- check off your bucket list - do the things you’ve always wanted to do now
if the world is accelerating exponentially, your present day behavior should reflect that - this is just an update to assumptions
if anyone else has ideas around this theme that i've not included here, please drop them in the comments 👇