The Industrial Man

My friend Uli told me just last week: with AI, I have never been more productive. I can say the same. At the same time, the backlog of Software-as-a-Service startup ideas I had in the back of my mind, things I wanted to build one day, got obliterated by AI. Most of them simply don't make sense anymore.

remove.bg, for example, was a darling of mine. I always wanted to rebuild it. Today I realized I don't have to. There is an excellent free version on Hugging Face, an entire AI model that does nothing else.

The only ideas worth pursuing now are the ones that involve the physical world in some way, real estate, a marketplace, or anything built on top of AI. With that last category I would be a little cautious, because overnight Anthropic might drop an ACME anvil on your head by shipping a feature that makes you obsolete. See OpenClaw and Anthropic's Co-Work.

What a time to be alive, and to be an industrial man. Industrial man? A person who builds out of curiosity. These people have fascinated me my entire life, and I hope I can count myself among them.

What I see now is that the gap between an industrial man and someone who keeps working like before is getting bigger and bigger. The throughput and output of an industrial person using AI is so gigantic that their impact on the world, on society, and on their own wealth outpaces that of a normal person so quickly that we might soon see a new stratum of society emerge.

A while ago, someone referred to this class of AI-versed entrepreneurs as the elite in football, a position that was always theirs. I replied that, staying in the analogy, it feels more like standing on the football field alone, while everyone else is at home and doesn't even know football is being played.

The gap might shrink once everyone else is forced to use AI in their daily life, or once "working" becomes obsolete altogether. But one thing stays true: the industrial man will keep working. Or in the words of Karl Lagerfeld: "I have always worked more, just to show everyone else how useless they are."

PS: I count women in this category too, but I refuse to use newspeak.

PPS: Good++.