Gutenberg 2.0
With artificial intelligence, production is no longer a constraint.
In 1400, books were rare treasures, painstakingly handwritten by monks cloistered away in musty monasteries.
Books were beyond a luxury — one single book would cost ~$30,000 in today’s money to produce.
Of course then, hardly anyone could read or write.
Information was scarce.
Then, in 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press. It’s not quite like the internet, but suddenly books could be mass-produced. Information exploded and literacy rates soared.
But that’s not the important thing that changed.
The important changes are the 2nd-order effects…
The printing press meant that anyone could directly read the Bible… which ushered in the reformation and the decline of the power of the Catholic church.
The printing press ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, which in turn brought a process of compounding knowledge generating, which led directly to our modern techno-centric world.
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To say that the Gutenberg printing press was a breakthrough, is a complete understatement.
Gutenberg was an earth-shattering, history-defining paradigm shift.
It lifted a fundamental constraint and democratized access to knowledge.
Gutenberg 2.0
Today, we’re at the brink of what I’ll call “Gutenberg 2.0”.
Just as the printing press made book production affordable for the masses, AI is making all kinds of content production easy and cheap.
Lots of things are currently constrained by the practical, boring limits of actually getting things done: the cost of video editing, the cost of writing code, the cost of learning actual skills.
But what if all that goes away with using AI? Then we’re only constrained by our imagination and the quality of our ideas.
With artificial intelligence, production is no longer a constraint.
Good ideas are.
Also here, I think it’s not the immediate implications, but rather the 2nd-order effects that will dominate the impact:
Historically, high production quality is a key hallmark of big, incumbent, established brands. In the near future, everyone will be able to match that production quality.
Historically, only large brands are able to produce and maintain a large and active blog, or YouTube channel, or well-written technical documentation. In the near future, everyone will be able to do that.
History, you’d have one creative director that leads a team of designers and developers to bring a product to life. In the near future, everyone will be able to harness a near-limitless army of top-quality designers and engineers to build things and write code.
Historically, only massive tech companies can maintain a suite of complex, feature-rich products. In the near future, the creation of extra product features will be so cheap as to be almost meaningless.
In all those cases, the production constraint will be lifted.
That will have all kinds of wild 2nd-order and 3rd-order effects.
So here’s what I’m betting on:
In the near future, those with the best quality ideas will win.
And when I say “near future”, that might actually mean…
“This year”
Cheers,
—Pieter