“The Radical Consequences of a Digital Economy” Bob Rice, Managing Partner of New Jersey-based Tangent Capital Partners, shares the revolutionary implications of Artificial Intelligence on global production, wages, competition, investments, and education before a March 21, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Bob Rice told the Club that the current digital revolution is making radical changes in the economy which will have radical societal consequences. The changes are occurring at a rate of speed that is hard, even for him, to comprehend.

He pointed out that the first digital camera was invented less than 50-years ago. With the popularity of the Internet and the Personal Computer, anyone can now transmit a photograph to half the world’s population instantly. “The latest iteration is Artificial Intelligence or AI, created by machine, and it’s just getting started. The advances and the consequences are mind-blowing and we have to be ready,” Rice said.

He then showed three brief videos that were created by computers solely with human text commands.

“They literally started with a blank screen with no pixels at all on the screen,” Rice said of the AI process. “Tyler Perry, the big movie guy in Atlanta, was shown this a month ago. He walked out and told The Hollywood Reporter ‘I'm putting my $800 million studio expansion on hold. Jobs are going to be lost.’”

He calls both the advances and the consequences “shocking.” Mr. Rice said we are seeing a “revolutionary revolution,” and he calls it that because it’s not happening in just one domain of human existence. It’s affected things such as the war in Ukraine, entertainment, and also medicine.

“Some of the medical advances that are coming out of this are absolutely mind blowing. The ability to create brand new antibodies that are proteins, specifically for your body, is happening right now.”

It’s a revolution that everyone will have access to.

“You don't need to be a specialist with 20-years of training to use this tool. You need to be able to speak or write something, and it will take care of it and do what you want it to do.”

He said that the Meta (formerly Facebook) open-source AI has been downloaded about 150-million times.

Mr. Rice also discussed human productivity and said the invention that most improved the world was the washing machine.

“Suddenly, electric washing machines freed up essentially half of humanity from six hours of drudgery every single day. And half of humanity was unleashed into things that were more economically productive,” he said, alluding that AI holds the same potential. (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast