When Everyone Has Infinite Leverage, Your Judgment & Taste Are What Matter
If you’ve played around with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Dall-E programs, you know that the “robot army” (as Naval Ravikant likes to call it) has arrived to carry out your orders.
But now, you don’t even have to speak their “language” to control them. Text-based interfaces like ChatGPT allow you to give instructions in your language, and the artificial intelligence will carry it out in theirs. The days of having to learn how to code are quickly disappearing. Just give good prompts, get good results.
And when everyone has infinite leverage, your judgment and taste are what matter.
Now Everyone Has Infinite Leverage.
Leverage is just another word for tools that magnify the impact of your decisions.
A construction worker will have a much larger impact with an earth-moving tractor than with a shovel, just as an investor will have more impactful returns (both positive and negative) with a one hundred million dollar investment than a one thousand dollar investment.
These are examples of labor and capital leverage. But one of the most powerful forms of leverage (the form that has created the billionaires of today) is code - an army of robots to carry out your wishes.
Here’s Naval Ravikant explaining this in his article, How To Get Rich:
“An army of robots is already here. It’s very cheaply available. The bottleneck is just figuring out intelligent and interesting things to do to them. Essentially you can order this army of robots around. The commands have to be issued in a computer language, in a language that they understand. These robots aren’t very smart. They have to be told very precisely what to do and how to do it. Coding is such a great superpower because now you can speak the language of the robot armies and you can tell them what to do.”
Code is the language of the internet. It’s behind every piece of software, every website, every blog.
But now, you don’t actually have to know how to code to command the robots.
You don’t have to speak their language. You can learn how to prompt artificial intelligence with words to build apps, create websites, and control the robots of the internet.
Just as non-coders will now create code with words, non-photographers will create epic photos with text prompts, and non-videographers will create videos of increasing complexity with nothing but visual descriptions.
Naval’s wish is coming true in real time:
“I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment.”
With infinite leverage now available to everyone, it’s what you do with it that’s important. It’s your judgment and taste that will set you apart.
Once You Have Leverage, You Need Good Judgment To Get Paid.
Now that you have leverage, it’s up to you to use your judgment to determine how best to apply it inside your circle of competence. You can build products, write books, create apps, make videos from scratch - anything you want. You just have to make good decisions repeatedly to compound your efforts.
One of the reasons I’m attracted to writing for film and TV (besides loving it) is that each script is a blueprint for the execution of a much larger production. Hollywood uses labor, capital, code, and digital media with a zero marginal cost of reproduction to compound my efforts on the page. That’s leverage!
It means the choices I make about what project to do - the genre, characters, plot, story, and execution of that story - are magnified 1000x by Hollywood’s leverage machine.
And if you’re only 10% better than the next writer at the top of the industry, all that applied leverage means you get paid a lot more than 10% more.
Here’s Naval Ravikant explaining this in the context of investing:
“In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill… If you’re steering a big ship, if you’re steering Google or Apple, and your judgment is 10 or 20 percent better than the next person’s, society will literally pay you hundreds of millions of dollars more, because you’re steering a $100 billion ship… Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility… People will throw infinite leverage behind him because of his judgment. Nobody asks him how hard he works; nobody asks him when he wakes up or when he goes to sleep. They’re like, ‘Warren, just do your thing.’”
As an investor, once Buffett makes a decision all he has to do is call his broker to purchase or sell stocks and the order gets executed. The “how” is taken care of. Buffett just has to decide which stocks to buy and sell and when to do it - that’s judgment.
And as artificial intelligence improves exponentially, it gets better at handling the “how” of any creative task in ways we never thought possible before. That’s why judgment becomes the differentiator… not necessarily execution.
Taste Is Giving Other People What You Want.
There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “Write the movie you want to see.” That’s taste. Taste is what you like and what you think is quality.
Brian Norgard recently wrote this on Twitter and it stuck with me:
“The Industrial Revolution rewarded the intensity of one’s labor, The Information Age the clarity of one’s thought and the AI Revolution the purity of ones’s taste.”
During the industrial revolution, input equaled output. The harder and longer you worked at the factory, the more success you’d have. More hard work in, more widgets out.
Then came the Information Age, where it wasn’t about physical labor anymore. It was about having great ideas, being able to process information, and solving problems. This is what “knowledge work” is all about.
Now, with artificial intelligence, it’s about good taste and discerning quality. AI can handle a ton of data and execute your ideas, but you need to bring your intuition, creativity, and refined sense of what’s good and what’s not to eventually get outsized results.
In the end, it all comes back to authenticity. What you like. What you jive with. And the standard you hold yourself and your work up to.
So command the robot army. Just make sure you’re not making stuff for the sake of making stuff. Create what you want to see in the world, and you’ll find someone else who wants to see it too. Those are your people… and your customers.
Start now.