Why You Should Read This
AI will create both winners and losers—which will you be?
The reason you should read this book is simple: AI is changing everything, but most people are scratching their heads when it comes to figuring out how they can benefit from it.
Historically, AI was an incredibly inaccessible field. The only way to get real, hands-on experience with artificial intelligence tech that mattered was to have a PhD and work at a place like Google or Facebook. With the advent of free, powerful tools like ChatGPT, that's now changed.
What hasn't changed is the fact that there will be both winners and losers created by this new era of technology, just like every previous epoch in history. The question then becomes: if you don't make any changes, which will you be?
Will You Get Automated Out of Business?
The truth is that the elites with money and influence will be fine, as always. It's everyone else, especially those who don't have the time or resources to keep up with technological changes, who will be affected by the AI revolution the most. With all that in mind, I put this guide together for those of you who don't have deep levels of expertise in this field.
You might find out that you're in serious danger of falling behind competitors who know how to leverage AI better than you. Alternatively, you might discover that you can sleep well because it looks like you're good for the foreseeable future. Either way, I guarantee that you'll learn something new about how AI (and automation in general) is going to change your world—and your ability to make a living.
Avoiding Information Overload
To be clear: the problem is not a lack of information. The problem is structure: the information supply is overwhelming, and there aren't enough resources geared towards simplification. My goal here is to remedy that by giving you a roadmap for understanding the problem and, ultimately, solving it in your own life.
What you get in this book is not just a tsunami of information to drown in, but a focused set of ideas for understanding how you can avoid losing out in society because of this technological wave. By doing this, I'm giving you some signals to guide your search through our information-rich world. In other words: It's a way to save you time and energy sorting through the copious amounts of riff-raff that's out there.
Overall Structure
The book itself is way to build a strong conceptual foundation, rather than a set of answers or predictions. Nobody knows what the future holds, especially when it comes to a world-changing technology like AI. So although I have my own views, I try my best to simply give you the lay of the land in the most accurate way possible and then allow you to leverage that in your own, unique way.
Within each section there are a nearly infinite number of rabbit holes you can fall into. How deep you go within each one depends on your time, interest and current level of knowledge. No matter what, you will not find any dead ends here: it's a fast-moving, complex subject that is on a trajectory of exponential expansion.
It's also not a detailed explanation of every technical AI concept. There are already so many books and other resources that cover this math-heavy, esoteric field. My goal is to help people who aren't engineers or scientists, not train you to be one (although you will benefit from reading it even if you are interested in that path). This means I've simplified some concepts for the sake of clarity and ignored others because they aren't germane to the subject at hand.
Leveling the Playing Field
One of the biggest problems facing our society is the lack of educational opportunities for people who aren't in their early twenties and living in a tech metropolis.
There are boatloads of programs to help people without resources when they're college age, but virtually none for 35 year olds with kids and a mortgage who are facing the threat of job or revenue loss due to AI. Instead, they're expected to just sort of figure it out by Googling around haphazardly. This book is one step towards solving that problem.
Don't expect to grasp it all at once. Instead, you should treat this book like it's a class on how to keep yourself alive and thriving in the age of AI. Use it to come up with ideas, execute on at least a few of them, and then come back regularly to find the next piece of the puzzle you want to wrap your mind around.
Key Points
AI is changing everything at a dizzying pace, and you need to keep up if you want to survive.
This new paradigm will create winners and losers - ask yourself which you'll be and act accordingly.
This book is written to help you avoid information overload within a very deep field.
Read as much or as little as you need to each time you visit, just make sure you apply what you learn so you don't get left behind.
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