Everyone Thinks They Will Outlast and Outcompete Every Other Person Not Riding the AI Wave

I’m not buying it

Photo by Vik Molina on Unsplash

Sit down,
Be humble

— Kendrick Lamar

As was the case in most of the essays of the girls in my class, they imagined a man in a sleek Mercedes would find them and take them to fairytale land.

The story is no different from the hope of bagging a multimillionaire or billionaire to change one’s life. As Sauti Sol have sang, “Heri ulie kwenye Rangi Rover, ama ucheke kwenye bodaboda.” Money can change situations.

As of this writing, Forbes reports a little over 3000 dollar billionaires. That’s less than 0.00004% of human beings. Not every man can be a billionaire, and not every woman can marry one. Then again, as JAŸ-Z reiterated, “What’s better than a billionaire?” and Beyonce, now a certified billionaire, replied, “Two.”

The number of women living the deluded life that they will get a filthy rich husband is insane. Reality is more humbling. At some point, the phrase “strong and independent woman” was a thing; now it is hardly spoken of. Most of the women I know want to be taken care of. Treated with love. Reduce their working hours to a bare minimum, if it is even necessary, a desire that is different from the popular definition of “lazy.”

This deluded idea is similar to what we see in the AI world. Everyone who has jumped on the AI bandwagon believes they are on the frontier of something big. I’m not buying it.

Several reasons that support my stance are similar to the fantasy of women marrying a billionaire. The only difference is that divorcing a billionaire can still leave you wealthy. You cannot divorce your attachment to AI and expect a bounty in return.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) was a pivotal backend feature for many websites. Google could include your website on the first search page if you customized it well. I first learned about it when I began writing online, a year after joining campus. I didn’t care much about it, only that my classmates loved the stories I shared.

A healthy chunk of SEO advice works ideally for the early users. It’s the same level playing field, but not everyone will have the same strategy. Those who use SEO would have a better chance of stealing eyes.

On the other hand, you cannot apply the same rules as every other person and expect different results. It is bound to be random. Network effects then decide who gets the lion’s share of traffic. Once this is established, Google search results will display website-equivalents of billionaires on their first pages.

Randomness contributes more to the outcomes when everyone is playing by the same rule book. AI is the current book. The script is a live document, growing every day. We don’t know how many chapters it will have. Yet, articles will continue to get shared and written about the impact of AI. The viral ones, like Matt Shumer’s post, will sell and spread with the conclusion that: if you’re not already in the wave, you are playing a losing game.

I’m not buying it.

Not everyone will become a billionaire.

Building is the easy part now

Building used to be hard. I once joined a group of construction workers and had the easy task of sprinkling water on the corrugated cement. The more heavily sinewed men would carry the bales to and fro, only to get less than five hundred shillings (less than $5) after a sweltering day.

In the online space, leverage has switched. Virtual agents have replaced human labour. You could schedule your posts. I schedule mine, although without AI assistance. It’s how I can write every day. AI has injected steroids into the online building space. Vibe coding has converted what was initially hard into simple.

At some point, I wanted to create an online space for artists to share their work and get paid. The creative tax subjected to artists disturbed me. Few people were trying to improve their economic status. I barely had money, but I wanted artists to make something. I have long shelved the idea, because AI agents could find a way to game the system. Building is now the easy part for everyone and every AI entity.

What is hard is making people feel. In essence, building structures is simple; being pleasantly attached to those structures is difficult. I may be biased coming from a health point of view, but starting a health centre or clinic is simple. Keeping patients coming is difficult. Patients will come back if they feel they have been understood.

I will continue using an AI programme if the issue raised by a customer is well addressed. Even better, if it is handled faster than anticipated. The customer will likely feel acknowledged.

Building a platform that scales is the easiest way to get complaints. Not addressing the complaints will have people leave for better alternatives. Not everyone knows how to handle complaints. Frustration can easily corrupt a solid business idea.

The cheapest option is to pay others to handle the complaints. But how fast will your AI product or service make to pay your new hires? The adjacent alternative is to find another AI agent to handle complaints. It still requires more money from you, but it’s somewhat cheaper. However, now your responsibility has increased. More supervision. You can’t trust AI to handle your customers without a quality assurance system. Vibe coding is with us, but we forget Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

AI was supposed to reduce work. But by making building easy, it expands the work of anyone who may have wanted to venture solo. Building may be easy, but those who remain will either have unparalleled grit, money, or taste. The cheapest of these, and arguably the most defining one, is taste.

Taste is the differentiator

Taste is natural. It builds over time. Taste is dependent on the circumstances of birth and opportunities handed in life. It lacks a scale. For that reason, it can be distinguished just as easily.

Adele can command an orchestra. So can many other powerful voices. But Adelle has taste. Her songs, her inflections, her style are the reasons we continue to go back to her songs.

The analogy? Anyone can build: Anyone can sing. Taste is the differentiator. AI can generate songs: Humans can generate songs. Taste is the differentiator. AI can write: Henrik Karlsson can write. Taste is the differentiator.

Taste is as unique as its wielder. We gravitate towards the unique attractors. Their unique taste is vast enough to attract more than their family members to their creative work.

What’s more, taste requires an uneconomical bond to your creation. It might not bring you the returns you wish, but you love doing it. It’s what distinguishes the mere concatenation of words from publishing an article or a song with the poetic justice of J. Cole or Kendrick Lamar.

J. Cole, for instance, wanted to make an album that he would never imagine topping: The Fall-Off. His fans have been waiting for years. Finally, when he dropped the message, the internet went crazy. The replay value of the double-album is insane. I have listened to it over 10 times now. Some of the songs continue to echo in the back of my mind every other time. Great taste has that effect.

Hip-hop is a unique case of art where taste is boldly required of its artists. If you’re good, you’re told as much. If you’re whack, the industry will not hesitate to remind you. Even the good ones are not safe. It is also the only musical genre where artists sing about the genre. Embodied as a lady who moves about, artists from Common to J. Cole have written about hip-hop, displaying a different kind of love, almost synonymous with the one between Arsenal fans and the football team.

You can use AI to build, but if your reasons for building are not tied to the enjoyment you get from building, it is highly unlikely that you will last. It is this joy that builds taste. You can tell an artwork or creation that took someone time to make. Similarly, in writing, taste is like salad. Sherry Ning has taste. The absence of taste is like word salad. Bland. AI writing is bland.

In biology, taste is an emergent feature. Sugar has carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Neither of these tastes like sugar. Sugar, too, has different registers on the palate. Each is different from an emergent perspective.

Fans remain because of taste. Taste that persists takes time. And taste maintains, both the creator and the audience.

Maintenance is the filter

Building is easy, taste separates, and maintenance filters the ones who love their work from anyone who just wants to build.

Vibe coding will give you the tools, but sticking around separates oneself from the other vibe coders.

One of the best ways I know of sticking around is not falling in love with our best solutions, but with our best problems. A reasonable scientist will tell you to kill your best ideas. Killing something you have taken time to build can be painful. Creating is itself painful. Killing is a buzzkill.

We can flip this concept to fall in love with the problem, rather than the solution. A problem can be paralysed, but not necessarily killed, by finding its best solution. Even then, they produce other problems. No solution is air-tight. Solutions reveal the multiple layers beneath problems. Falling in love with a problem keeps you going.

Given the tools to build, maintenance can be achieved by falling in love with a problem. How well do you know the problem you are solving?

Experts earn their name because they have tried every possible solution to a problem. They know what works and what doesn’t, and what conditions are needed for either of these outcomes. So when an alternative solution is presented, they know the best way to gauge its mettle is to test it. This is how an expert understands a problem.

Falling in love with the problem is, therefore, a quest to understand the possible solutions and their pitfalls. Although I don’t like to think of myself as an expert, I came to this realization when I landed in the field of evolutionary biology. It was no different from Alice’s slip into the rabbit hole. Now I can’t exit. Why? Because I learned and loved the problems of evolutionary biology.

A simple example is that natural selection is a population-centric theory. It has extraordinary explanatory power, but it’s most accurate from an adaptationist stance. It cannot explain the persistent yet mal- or non-adaptive features. What’s more, it needs a large population and a protracted time. If the numbers reduce, it loses power. If time is reduced, it loses power. The next best theory is genetic drift. But only up to a point. Group selection theories can hardly explain the persistence of cooperation when individuals gain more from selfish behaviour. It is a paradox of reality. The further we reduce the numbers, the more we go to the core of my biggest problem — how can cooperation emerge from a single organism? It needs at most two of them. But it begs the question, what features did the first organism have? It is surely not selfishness because selfishness needs others for its quality to manifest. It cannot compete nor cooperate. If cooperation emerged, did it happen after the first organism duplicated or several generations later? What about competition? And the biggest singularity in evolution is the first organism. No mainstream theory explains this anomaly.

Close to a decade later, I am still in love with the singularity problem. I have stayed in the game. Can we say the same about those who vibe code? Seasoned coders could crack and pull their hair the whole night looking for a bug. It could be exciting, as it is frustrating. Will vibe coders stick around? The time is too short to tell. But if falling in love with a problem is anything to go by, many vibe coders will fall off along the way. The AI vibe coding frenzy is likely to die out.

Today, our reality is squeezed into our virtual experience. Before this period, we had many heavy objects scattered all over the world. The terrain was uneven and perfect for an athlete to train in. We were homeothermic, capable of migrating from one territory to another. And yet, the majority of the world is not ripped and athletic. Now that our reality is largely virtual, history dictates a similar outcome.

Gym rats love working out. It is like an obstacle they love to conquer every time they visit it. A problem they have fallen in love with. And finally, there are those who have fun while at it.

And fun is the lasting advantage.

Comparative advantage

Take Timbaland. Of all the songs I have heard from him, he injects some parts of his voice into his beats. Either sung, rapped, or beatboxed. The final product is out of this world.

Timbaland can walk into a park, listen to birds chirping, record it, and include it in a beat. The keen ear will notice it. Timbaland is someone who has fun producing songs.

I have read countless articles, tweets (again, I can’t call them Xs), captions, and watched videos, reels, and snippets that speak of AI as revolutionizing the future, often with the idea that if you don’t join the ship soon, you will be left out. For the life of me, I cannot find anyone (besides maybe someone like Dr. Eugene Wechuli or Dr. Fred Mutisya) who mentions the fun parts of the process.

But is it fun though?

Sam Altman was forced to consider ads in OpenAI. Revenue comes first. Anthropic, despite its initial goal to make AI that favours humans, has been facing lawsuit after lawsuit, issuing while receiving. Money defines these wars.

As efficiency reveals itself as a black hole in the LLMs space, asking for more money does not invite a space to enjoy these moments.

The kind of challenge that one considers fun is the one where you try to tackle the problem without giving up. Not so much that you’re always smiling. The fun is in solving the problem or designing something new. Revenue may or may not come, but fun defines the process.

By the mere fact that those in the race are struggling to outcompete each other, fun is hardly a feature you can highlight as distinguishing your team from the rest. Investors want returns. Not fun. The investment space is red in tooth and claw. Finish the race, then you can have fun. That’s the rule.

On the flip side, those having fun barely think of their competitors. Blind to competition, they can create new features without racing to finesse the efficient function of a single one.

Take images as an example. Apps in competition will strive to improve the quality of every uploaded image, while one that focuses on fun will try to create emojis from every image created and hang them at the bottom. New ideas, without competition, while having fun, create an unmatched advantage. That leads to the aspect of comparative advantage.

Comparative advantage looks at opportunity costs. How much does one have to forego while pursuing a certain option? Fun completely depletes the switching costs.

Usually, when everyone is in a race, what matters is not opportunity costs. The priority is on absolute advantages. And since everyone is competing based on their relative position to the others, they cannot afford to switch. It turns into an escalation game.

In systems dynamics, escalation is a problematic archetype. It is not sustainable and has to be diffused. Small wonder many voices echo the bubble-like features of the AI fiasco.

But fun? Who can take fun away from you?

Power laws are inevitable

Power laws are the final nail in the coffin.

There are celebrities, then there are mega celebrities.

There are hip-hop artists who made classic albums, and then there are those who made the classic albums and have a lengthy list of awards to show for it.

There are amazing writers, and there are legacy, household names. We all know J. K. Rowling. Not many know Jackson Biko, even though he’s a fantastic writer.

The irony is, the stage is already set for who will be the biggest winners in the AI race. They are the ones selling the idea. Elon Musk. Sam Altman. Dario Amodei. Google’s founders. The GPU chip producers. Microsoft owners. The influencers who preach about the impact of AI are not included in this list.

Power laws are not predictable, but the ones who are key in the game shape the future, and thus, have a larger surface area for luck. Their goal is not necessarily to be the first to generate some super-intelligent alien tech so much as to continue in the race towards being the more relevant and memorable name.

They are not competing with you or that person who shared their ideas on AI the other day on social media. They are competing with each other. They are the mega celebrities. As Kendrick rapped, “There’s levels to it, you and I know,” before he asks that we be humble.

I would recommend we listen to that song before targeting anyone who isn’t riding the AI wave.

What I’m trying to say is…

I’d much rather define AI as “Alien Intelligence” than “Artificial Intelligence”. As it is, we know little about the intelligent species in the biosphere, much less about AI.

In the same vein, we know little about the outcomes.

But as far as claiming that those who don’t hop aboard the AI ship would lose, I am extremely skeptical. I would recommend they pay keen attention to the chorus of Lamar’s song:

Be humble,
Sit down

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This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube