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What Is the Most Profitable Strategy of All Time?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino
Listen to Steve read this post below (Bonus garden bird noises in the background!)

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Steal Things.

No, I’m not being flippant — that’s how most of the insanely large fortunes have been built through history. By theft I don’t mean breaking into a vault or armed robbery — it’s far more subtle than that… But hear me when I say that stealing is, without question, the most profitable business model in history.

So, what do I mean by stealing?

I mean — taking things which aren’t yours, or anyone’s for that matter. Think appropriation, extraction, control, or the co-opting of someone else’s labor, property, idea or data. If you doubt it, just look at every empire that’s ever existed — both nation state and corporate.

The trick? Extract it before the ‘victims’ realise its value.

From the dawn of commerce, to the dawn of AI, every major fortune has been built on the same foundation: taking something that wasn’t yours, fencing it off, and pretending you created what’s inside the new boundary. Oh, and then charge people for access to it.

Imperialists did it first.

They didn’t create value — they extracted it.

They turned land, minerals, spices and sadly, even people into asset classes. They drew lines on maps and said, this is ours now. They imposed their arrival through the barrel of a gun, military might over less developed, new found colonies.

Then came the industrialists.

The oil oligarchs, the mining magnates, the robber barons. They didn’t invent oil, they dug it up and declared ownership. Whoever gets there first, gets rich — everyone else pays rent forever.

Then came the factories. Cars, steel, rail, assembly lines. They didn’t invent human effort, they just systemised and re-packaged it. They stole independence from the farm and the craftsmen and sold it back as wages. They stole time itself — hours punched on a clock — and offered weekends as consolation.

And here’s the kicker: every new technology creates a new thing to steal.

Data Was the New Oil

Fast forward to the digital era. The oil of our time became data. In 1995 the biggest seven companies in the world were in the energy business. Today the biggest seven companies mine attention. Both cohorts are in the business of extraction.

Big Tech figured out that the most valuable resource on Earth wasn’t underground — it was inside us. Our clicks, likes, faces, voices, connections, our thoughts… our waking hours. (Side note: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once quipped that their biggest competitor was sleep.)

They harvested it, repackaged it, and sold it back to us as “personalised experiences.”

Facebook didn’t ask for your data. They just took it.

YouTube didn’t license music. They stole it first, scaled the audience, got huge venture funding and then cut deals, with their newfound financial power backed by Google.

Uber didn’t disrupt taxis — it ignored the value of taxi licences that drivers had paid hundreds of thousands for. They broke the law until they got the law changed — assisted by their $13.2 billion in venture funding and political donations.

It’s the same playbook over and over again: move fast, fill the zone, make the theft irreversible.

… Then AI arrived & Stole at Scale

The next great heist wasn’t oil, or factories, or social media. It was knowledge itself.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was trained on the entire internet — every book, every blog post, every picture and video they could scrape. Whole careers, libraries of art, lifetimes of writing and creative output — downloaded without permission. My three books are even in there.

Early outputs even carried Getty Images’ watermarks, proving where the training data came from. The New York Times is suing them for exactly this — ChatGPT could reproduce entire paywalled articles word for word. Yep, content wasn’t just learned, it was ‘lifted’.

When a human copies your work, we call it plagiarism. When an AI does it at planetary scale, we call it progress.

Enter Sora 2 —

The AI grift is continuing…

OpenAI just released Sora 2, a text-to-video model that can generate astonishingly realistic clips. People, places, characters, especially copyrighted ones… all of it, drawn from the vast ocean of human creativity that was scraped from the web without permission.

And you guessed it, they made it opt-out. Meaning your art, your likeness, your face, your voice can be used unless you explicitly tell them not to. Imagine that was a shop: “Hey, we are stealing your merchandise unless you tell us not to.” You can’t make this stuff up.

That’s not consent — that’s corporate gaslighting.

We shouldn’t have to fight for what’s already ours.

For the record: Sora 2’s creators now promise better control for copyright holders — watermarks, provenance tags, and verification systems. But that’s not protection, that’s paperwork. They already filled the zone.

The Flood the Zone Strategy

The most effective form of theft isn’t just sneaky. It’s overwhelming — on purpose.

If you flood the system fast enough, by the time the lawyers arrive, the world has already changed. Ask Uber. Ask YouTube. Ask Meta.

In economics, whoever defines the default wins. Opt-out means “you’ve already lost, you just don’t know it yet.”

The pattern is simple:

  • Break the rules.
  • Get rich doing it.
  • Pay fines later — it’s cheaper than permission.

That’s what’s happening with generative AI. It’s flooding the cultural zone — scraping everything we’ve made to train machines that will eventually out-compete the very humans they learned from. Then once the economic machine embraces its power, regulators simply side with the money. They always do.

And we’re letting it happen because we’re too busy marvelling at the magic trick to notice our pockets are being picked.

I Vote “Yes” for AI, but…

Now for the ironic part. I believe all of these technologies (Facebook is borderline) have been a net good for humanity. They’ve improved living standards beyond human comprehension, and yes they’ve caused a lot of pain along the way. But life expectancy and living standards have increased tremendously with every technology revolution. The bit we need to fix, is the chicanery part. The part where regulators get stooged into letting ‘innovators’ define the rules of a new era. Where in reality we only need to make one small change:

Make sure innovators pay for their raw materials.

This simple shift — one single change — would allow us to benefit from the technology, without the largess going to a fortunate few who got there first, and allow humanity to benefit at scale through usage and the economic upside

The way we make it change is simple too: we need to have conversations about it. So be sure to share this with an astute friend. Thanks for reading.

Keep thinking,

Steve.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

From the Born to the Made

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Humanity is shrinking, but our subconscious survival strategy has already begun: we’ve given birth to bots

Back in 1968, Paul Ehrlich dropped his book called The Population Bomb. His fear? That humanity would breed itself into oblivion. He warned the planet wouldn’t cope — ecosystems would collapse, people would starve and cities would riot. At the time there were 3.5 billion people, and he said we’d smash past 7 billion by 2000. He forecast mass starvation by the millennium via a runaway 10–12 billion humans on earth.

The Twist?

The apocalypse wasn’t too many births. It’s the opposite. The real bomb is collapsing fertility, and a world not crowded with humans — but an emptying of them. For a thousand years we’ve lived with one simple truth: more people, more progress. Bigger populations meant more workers, more consumers, more ideas, more everything. The curve of human population and the curve of prosperity were twins.

But that’s over.

The global population is set to fall — not in some distant sci-fi future, but within the working lives of today’s teenagers. Globally, we’ve already crossed over the rate of self sustaining population (It is 2.3 births per female).

By around 2040 the number of deaths will outpace births, and the “up and to the right” graph of humanity starts sloping the other way. Replacement fertility? Forget it. Every nation that drops below has never bounced back. Not once. We’ve entered a black hole of demography.

And yet, in the same moment our species loses the appetite to reproduce, we’ve birthed something else: millions of bots, billions of algorithms, trillions of synthetic workers. Call it coincidence if you want, but I suspect it’s deeper — a subconscious survival tactic of our species. Seriously, I mean that. It’s like a form of collective sentience finding a solution.

We don’t breed kids, so we build bots. We’ve outsourced our reproductive drive into code and circuitry.

Think about it. The capitalist system we built was fuelled by growth — more humans, more markets, more demand. But in a world with fewer people each year, demand doesn’t just shrink — it evaporates. So we invite our synthetic offspring into the system to keep it humming. Machines making stuff for other machines. AIs creating content for avatars. Synthetic desires feeding synthetic labor.

Humans will still benefit, but indirectly. Bots will keep the economic flywheel spinning so we can spend our days on inefficiency — art, invention, exploration, companionship, nonsense. The things that don’t “scale” but make life worth living. Productivity is for robots. Humanity is for everything else. Finally we can be unproductive on purpose.

And maybe, just maybe, birth itself becomes optional. Because while fertility collapses, we’re hacking biology in parallel: regenerative medicine to regrow our parts, CRISPR to rewrite our genes, nanotech to repair us at the cellular level. Why have kids when you can live forever? If we choose, we can cheat death and create synthetic stand-ins to do the work instead.

So here we are. On the edge of a new epoch. Humanity shrinking by choice, bots multiplying by design, and biotech promising eternal life. It’s not the apocalypse — it’s the handoff. A species hedging its bets by replacing never-to-be-born humans with code, machines, and synthetic minds.

The real question is not whether the bots will take over. The question is whether we’ll use the freedom they give us to live bigger, wilder, more creative human lives — or whether we’ll stand still and be buried grain by grain in the robotic sandstorm we are currently giving birth to.

Keep Thinking,

Steve Sammartino

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

Proof AI Won’t Kill Creativity

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

… But It Will Kill Excuses — What Will You Make?

When new technology arrives, we can be buried by it, or stand on top of the platform it provides.

Imagine AI is a fast-moving sandstorm. If we stand still, it will bury us grain by grain. But if we are nimble, keep moving and discovering, we can climb on top of the sand as it piles up. We rise higher with every layer, we can reach new intellectual and creative heights, see the future — but only if we decide to step up.

He even provided the list of AI tools he used: Nano Banana, Veo 3, Kling, Runway Act Two, Elevenlabs, Sora, Udio, Suno, Photoshop and Premiere.

You don’t need to watch the entire thing, but I think it is worth just clicking through a few separate moments at a minimum to get a sense of it. It really is brilliant — in the same way any short film might be.

I mean, it could be directly from a Hollywood studio. The cool thing is that I’m watching it and wondering: how the heck did he create this? What were the prompts… what was the process… how did he do it and put the pieces together?

And that is exactly what creativity is.

It’s the way a human interacts with the world, their ideas, and using whatever tools are available… and here we are with a new way to be creative driven by new emerging AI tools.

Creativity isn’t dead — if anything, it is spawning entirely new species. Because more barriers to entry just went away. We no longer have to be filmmakers, animators, musicians, or any of those things to be creative.

What we need to be creative, is to be creative. Neural Viz proves it.

We can all play now — and industries, especially the creative ones, will be rewritten in terms of artistry, formats, and ways we can go to market. And of course, the business models around the outputs will change radically — they always do.

The real question now for all of us is this: What will we make?

Now that the skill gaps are gone (not just with things like animation and filmmaking), but any pursuit — we can create pretty much anything we can imagine. And right now is the time to do it, because there is no formal qualification required — just an informal ability to adopt the tools quickly and get more in your industry, by doing more of what is now possible. Those who do make an investment in their future, almost like an insurance policy for their economic future.

But there is one key to all of it. This is not about outsourcing. This is about inserting yourself deeply inside the technology so it reflects you, your point of view, and your ideas. Those who use AI to do their work for them are missing the point. The point is for it to make more of what was always inside you.

Keep Thinking,

Steve.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

What’s in the Museum of the Future?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

20 Things You’ll See in 20 Years

Walk into a museum in 2045, and it won’t look like something from the past — it will look like today. It will reflect our homes, offices, and streets.

So many ‘modern’ technologies, ideas, and even social constructs are about to disappear — much quicker than we think. You might even find this a bit confronting, even unrealistic. But all of it is based on the technological possibilities of today… so buckle up.

Here are 20 exhibits you can expect in the Museum of the Future — and why they matter.

1. Physical Money

Remember coins and crumpled notes? They still exist… barely. The concept of cash will seem so antiquated — tokens and paper with pictures on them. Already, money is just numbers on screens and in databases. You’ll realise your kids have never even held money.

Supporting Factoid: Globally, physical money only represents 8% of the total supply of ‘cash’ people can make a claim on. In Australia, it is only 4% today.

2. Professional Drivers

Imagine a wall of steering wheels, gear sticks, and car keys. Videos of Uber drivers, truckies, and couriers — the last generation who steered their own destiny. Autonomous vehicles made this a job from history.

Supporting Factoid: Waymo (Google’s self-driving service) already has 1,500 cars operating in the USA, and they have a greater market share than Uber in every market they operate in.

3. Passwords

A light installation flashing millions of random characters — reminders of the era when we were the security system. Biometrics and passkeys made the “password” as dead as the rotary dial phone.

We are already halfway there…

4. Remote Controls

A giant pile of remotes in a Perspex box — all useless. Gesture, voice, and neural interfaces mean we control the world by thought.

5. Plastic Packaging

Mountains of crinkly wrappers and water bottles. Kids will gawk at the waste and ask, “You wrapped everything in this stuff?”

Supporting Factoid: Plant-based bioplastics are emerging quickly to replace plastic with all the efficacy, as well as being fully biodegradable.

6. Physical Screens

Thin LCD panels on the wall, smashed phones under glass. The exhibit will ask: “Why did we stare at rectangles for 12 hours a day when the world was all around us?”

Possible Replacement: Direct wiring into neural cortex!

7. Smartphones

A special section: the thing that made us gods for 10 years and slaves for another 20. The artefact that connected, distracted, and reprogrammed humanity.

Supporting Factoid: Smart glasses are emerging quickly as the most likely candidate to replace them. Meta’s latest iteration is quite impressive. But eventually contact lenses will win this race.

8. Tradespeople

Robot arms laying bricks and 3D-printed plumbing rigs. And humanoids doing any and every type of trade. You’ll watch footage of human tradies from the 2020s and feel nostalgic for the banter, not the cost.

Supporting Factoid: Humanoid robots can already be bought for around $16k. By the end of this decade, they’ll do everything people can — after being shown once, or downloading some ‘how to’ software.

9. Surgeons

Delicate metal scalpels suspended mid-air. The last human hands to open a chest cavity before precision robotic surgery took over.

Supporting Factoid: There were 14+ million robotic surgical procedures performed last year. And the first non-human-assisted trials are happening this year. Question: Would you rather a surgeon who has performed an operation 87 times, or a robot that’s done it over a million times in every context?

10. Actors & Directors

A wing filled with deepfake celebrities performing Shakespeare in every language. The final days of the Hollywood “star system,” when studios owned the faces and voices of the famous.

In the future, studios will mint new stars from AI that they own and control and don’t have to pay. Or even license our old favourites like Leo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson… while they stay home and watch Netflix.

11. The Internet

A blacked-out room with a dial-up modem screeching on loop. You’ll watch a screen to experience what “the feed” used to look like — and how it hacked our attention before decentralised, sovereign data grids took over, and bots took over.

Supporting Factoid: Just this year, the internet crossed over to more fake traffic than real human traffic. Humans are already exiting the internet.

12. Language Barriers

A globe that speaks every language at once. AI real-time translation made borders linguistic illusions.

Supporting Factoid: Many current smartphones and the latest Apple AirPods can already do this live.

13. Offices

Cubicles, water coolers, swipe cards. The last relics of “going to work.” In the future, work is a network — not a place.

The age of the digital craftsperson is already here.

14. Eyeglasses

A shelf of spectacles — quaint relics before gene therapy and nano-optics corrected sight at birth, or for us existential humans within the next decade…

15. Wheelchairs

A striking display of mobility aids that became obsolete once exoskeletons and neurotech restored motion to millions.

16. Forgetting

A poetic, slightly eerie space where visitors can choose to delete a memory — and then sit with the silence. In a world of perfect recall, the right to forget became sacred.

Question: Would you want to remember everything (childbirth?) or are some life experiences best forgotten?

17. Ageing

A time-lapse projection of faces getting younger again. Regenerative medicine turned ageing into an option, not a destiny.

Supporting Factoid: Live till 2035 and you’ll live forever… Read this if you haven’t already.

Would you want to liver forever?

18. Organic Humans

Yes, there will be a whole exhibit on “baseline humans.” No implants, no genetic tweaks, no cloud extensions. Just raw, analogue Homo sapiens.

We are merging with machines… rapidly.

19. Animal Farms

Screens of industrial animal agriculture — now gone — next to vats of lab-grown meat. These will be nature-identical down to the exact texture at the molecular level. A celebration of the end of animal suffering as a source of protein.

Confronting Thought: 50 years from now, killing an animal to eat it will be seen as worse than human slavery… Our grandchildren will be disgusted we ever killed and ate dead animals

20. Private Thoughts

A dark, intimate room where visitors sit in silence. It will be the most confronting exhibit: a reminder that once upon a time, your thoughts were yours alone.

Supporting Factoid: We are already reading people’s minds… I wrote about it here.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

The museum of the future won’t just display objects — it will display values. It will remind us what we lost, what we gained, and what we traded along the way. It won’t just be a walk through history. It’ll be a mirror — showing us who we chose to become.

Now consider the work you do or the company you work for… and ask yourself important this question:

Is it time to pivot to avoid the inevitable?

Keep Thinking,

Steve.

The AI Sovereignty Gap

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

It’s time to play offence – build a National AI Data Grid and sovereign digital capability.

Australia is the 14th largest economy in the world — but on Harvard’s Economic Complexity Index we rank a disgraceful 103rd. In fact, we currently rank behind Bangladesh, Senegal, and Uganda — a shocking reality for a top-20 economy.

Why? Because we’ve quietly become a giant housing Ponzi scheme with a mining habit.

We don’t have a homegrown search engine.
We don’t have a social network.
We don’t have a local browser or operating system, any meaningful digital platform — or anything serious in AI.

Honestly, every time you type @gmail.com it should be @auspost.com.au
No — this wouldn’t be hard. And yes — I trust our government departments more than I trust Google. (At least we can vote out a government.)

Seriously, we should build platforms at a macro level for private industry to leverage. It’s the smart play.

And while it’s easy to shrug and say, “We can’t compete with Silicon Valley,” the truth is we can. I don’t buy the narrative that we’re too small to matter. We have some of the best universities and educators in the world — we must, education is our third-biggest export (about A$21 billion in tuition fees alone). Global firms want you to believe only they can do this…. those running any show always do.

We have a deep local talent pool in tech and engineering.

What we lack isn’t resources or talent — it’s courage and leadership. A few decades ago, during the period of economic rationalism, we did something incredibly irrational — we stopped leveraging our abundant resources to build sovereign capability. And what got was houses no one can afford and cheap t-shirts.

What we need now is the ability to ignore the naysayers and actually compete. And honestly, whenever Australia has had a crack, we usually do quite well. Sports, the arts, and world-changing inventions (Wi-Fi, anyone?) are simple and informative examples.

We Used to Make Things

Once upon a time, Australia made cars, clothing, electronics. Manufacturing was everywhere — and when we did, equality ran deeper. Opportunity was broader. We gave more Australians a seat at the economic table.

Today, we export rocks, import iPhones, and hope for the best. Our most successful tech companies (like Atlassian) list overseas. And we wonder why our economy feels hollow.

Sovereignty Is a Choice

It’s not too late to rebuild — but we need to remember something important: We are sovereign.

Governments can set the rules. Companies — even trillion-dollar ones — will follow.

China did this with manufacturing and later, technology. They forced foreign companies into joint ventures, built capacity, and are now globally competitive in every industry, at every scale.

We could do the same at the dawn of this new AI era.

Infrastructure Over New Businesses

I don’t think Australia should try to launch government-run businesses. But we can provide infrastructure at scale that businesses can leverage as a tool.

This is what all the rich industrial countries in the West used to do: electricity grids, gas pipelines, roads and highways — but somewhere along the way, they lost the script. It’s time we found it again.

And the time is now — at the dawn of a new era. If we don’t, we risk becoming subservient to foreign tech powers, just as developing economies were to the West in the 1970s and ’80s.

Imagine This

  • Every hyperscale data centre built in Australia was partly government-owned, funded by the very big tech firms using it.
  • Or we built a National AI Data Grid — A$100B worth of GPU infrastructure — owned by the government and made open source for Australian startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs to tap into.
  • We let 1,000 flowers bloom, giving every clever mind in the country access to the raw compute power they need to build AI tools, platforms, and companies.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

Ignore the Naysayers

The AFR recently ran a piece saying it would be “crazy” for Australia to build its own LLM. I think it would be crazy not to.

Others say it can be done for under A$100M — and they’re right. But even if it cost A$10B, the long-term payoff in capability, exports, and independence would dwarf it.

The 21st Century Imperative

Australia can no longer rely on digging things up and selling them to the world. We need to build things again — digital things, and AI tools.

If we don’t, we stay stuck at the bottom of the economic complexity league table. If we do, we become the future-facing economy we like to imagine we already are.

Let’s stop renting the future from Silicon Valley.
Let’s own a piece of it.

Keep thinking,

Steve.

Income ≠ Value: The Tax Revolution the World Needs

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Tax policy doesn’t need more loopholes – it needs more courage.

 

Why We Need to Tax Work Differently

There’s something broken in the way money flows through our economy. The more I look at it, the more absurd it seems.

I’m pretty sure many (if not most) of my readers will hate this idea, and they’ll think it is unworkable. They’ll say that this isn’t how free markets should work. But we don’t live in a ‘free market’ — we live in a mixed economy. And guess what, it’s time to mix things up again. Because the current shape of the incentives and rewards in our economy is completely upside down.

Somewhere along the way we let the market trick us.

We confused price with value.

We told ourselves if someone gets paid a lot, they must be creating a lot. But that’s not how it works anymore. Corporate capture and voracious capitalism have flipped the script. The biggest pay packets now go to people who extract value from the system, not those who create it.

Think about it:

  • Teachers shape the future, yet struggle to pay their own mortgage.
  • Farmers feed us, but supermarkets skim most of the profit.
  • Builders and trades keep the country running, but the margins go upstairs to financial engineers who never get dirt under their nails.

This disconnect matters. When money rewards the wrong things, talent flows to the wrong places. Bright young minds skip medicine, teaching, or research, and instead pile into investment banking, corporate law, or consultancy gigs that are high-pay, low-impact.

A Radical Rethink: Tax Work by Social Contribution

So here’s a wild idea: stop taxing people by income alone. Start taxing them by the social contribution of their work.
  • Nurses, teachers, paramedics, farmers — tax-free up to $200K. These people are the spine of society.
  • Average jobs — those that are not evil or life-changing — pay normal tax rates.
  • Extractive industries and jobs — investment banking, hedge funds, corporate law designed to game the system — 80% tax rates for every dollar over $200K.

Sound extreme? It’s no different to what we already do. We tax tobacco because it harms society. We give rebates for solar panels because they help the planet. Why not apply the same logic to labour?

What It Fixes

  • It rebalances incentives. Bright students might choose to be doctors or teachers if the money isn’t a barrier.
  • It reconnects money with value. No more rewarding speculation over contribution.
  • It shifts culture. We’d stop glorifying the biggest bonus and start respecting the biggest impact.

Imagine a country where the best-paid people are the ones who keep us healthy, feed us, and build our future. Imagine if the word “banker” meant someone tending food crops, not credit default swaps.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

Here’s the payment plan!

So here’s a thought:

We tax the 161 Australian billionaires—but this time with a wealth tax, not an income tax (so there’s no wriggling out of it). Let’s set it at 10% of their net worth, which collectively sits at around $549 billion. That would generate about $55 billion in tax revenue every year. To put that in context, the total tax collected from everyone earning under $150k is roughly $200 billion. So these numbers could actually work—with a bit of fine-tuning around who pays and who doesn’t – it’s financially workable. We could seriously reshape things

And the billionaires? They don’t need to stress. Their net worth has been growing at around 11% per annum on average for the past decade, so they’d still be getting richer even after paying up.

In fact, we should give them all a trophy engraved with: “Congratulations, you did it!”

That’s the kind of Australia I’d like to live in.

If you want things to be better – then the best place to start is usually with the system, and that takes new thinking and a lot of courage.

From Streetlights to Street-Bots

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Why the Robot Economy is inevitable…

Starting now – we are creating the Robot Economy. A system where we produce, distribute, exchange, and consume services which would literally not be possible without the existence of humanoid robots. It’s already underway – and I recently bought a robot for $17,000 which arrives in December.

Economic History Repeats

We’ve been here before – invented entirely new ‘economies’ – well, let’s call them economic segments based on the emergence of new technology. A simple example is what economists call ‘The Night Time Economy’. This is defined as all economic activities which occur between the hours of 6pm and 6am. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Sure, people went to local inns for a meal in their village for millennia, but that was an economic rounding error. But the Night Time Economy didn’t really exist before electricity was common. In the 1890s Melbourne and Sydney got electric street lights, but it was only in the 1920s when mass adoption occurred. With a similar timeline in the UK and USA.

In Australia the Night Time Economy is estimated to be around 12% of GDP. This includes not only spending in bars, restaurants, and late-night retail, but 24-hour production, logistics, health, mining, and manufacturing – none of which can happen without electricity. (Approx $326 billion AUD)

As you might imagine the ‘Automobile Economy’ is even bigger – of course there is overlap – but it amounts to 20% of our GDP. (Approx $540 billion AUD)

Inventing $400 billion of Economic value

I want this to serve as a reminder that there won’t be an AI job apocalypse. In fact, there never is, and it is not going to be different this time either. Instead, we’ll give birth to the Robot Economy. And it is going to include all the things you can already imagine. Robot production, selling, leasing, distribution, management, training (on every physical job that exists), onboarding, task setting, servicing, repairs, modifications, clothes, skins, charging stations, hardware recycling, insurance, subscription services, domestic help, fleet management, storage, certification, brokers… even sports leagues.

(Recent robot games here and fight club here)

In addition to this there’ll be hundreds of deployments and related industries we can’t yet imagine. We’ll basically build infrastructure, offer services, create lifestyles, enable governance and drive an entirely new Robot Culture. Just like we did with cars and night time. All of which have economic implications. I imagine this being about at least 15% of GDP in modern economies.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

The amazing robots which you can train by literally telling and showing what to do are still very expensive – between $100–200K. (By the way you only have to show it once, unlike our children and staff!). The cheaper ones ($15–30K) currently have limited functionality and require programming. But we only need to think of what happened with laptops and smartphones to know how affordable they’ll become. I predict around $30K for a verbally trainable bot by the end of this decade. And when that happens, they’ll be in every home and workplace. Just like there is a ‘horseless carriage’ in every driveway.

Tech revolutions always have two ingredients:

  1. The technology is amazing, must-have and feels like magic. ✔️
  2. It’s democratised – affordable and available to everyone. ✔️

    We have 2 ticks, and it happens now.

Keep Thinking,

Steve.