Why My Startup may Never Scale

TLDR: I am studying how we organise boring individual humans to be more productive organisations, under the assumption that in the near future 99% of individual humans will qualify as rather boring individuals. So while most startups seem to want to figure out how to maximise profit from managing the 99%, I think we currently focus more on learning how to shred margins for the startup until it cannot lose the trust of the 99%.

* I was at a meeting a few days ago, when the subject of my office's marketing direction came up. We're now in our fifth year of operations, and so far we have worked mainly on the problem of squeezing value out of workers earning no more than 2x of minimum wage. I speak frequently about huge opportunities in this realm, using catchy phrases like '70% of all [horeca, coYspace, and facilities management] businesses have 90% of their business operations in common, and we want to own that space'. But why do we bother to pursue these opportunities? The answer is trite: revolutionary technology.

** In general, people admit that software and hardware automation will gradually replace jobs that have been conventionally performed by humans. Regardless of how much you agree about what a machine will be able to do, we probably agree that automation will remove the need for much human labour from the economy. And then we're back to one of my favourite questions from antiquity, 'what the hell are humans going to do with their time when that happens?'. And if there is a surplus of labour-hours, does that mean that the value of labour-hours will continue to drop, such that the average labourer would not be able to thrive merely on the sale of their own labour (Marx's issue)? While it's tempting to try to answer that from a humanistic point of view, I prefer to think of it as a broader "industrial organisation design" problem which presents itself to entrepreneurs.

Here's what I assume will happen. As a premise, the skills and strengths which people believe to make them special, as individuals, are going to matter less and less from an objective point of view... as EVERY differentiating factor will be replaceable at a quicker rate by machines.

A few possibilities follow.

In the medium term, it's possible that the ontology of differentiating factors among humans will encounter a sort of Cambrian explosion as thousands of niche interests are grown into larger cognitive and cultural disciplines occupied by entire tribes. So we should, on one hand, expect an opportunity for a renaissance in arts, if not the sciences as well (since science progresses as a function of the diversity of hypotheses produced at the top of its epistemological funnel). This may manifest itself in the medium term.

In the short term, if economically profitable opportunities do not appear for most individuals (and they probably won't), then we are going to see a rise in inequality as fewer elite technocrats will be required to 'call the shots' and 'run the world', while everyone else gets corralled into cattle-class. This may manifest itself in the short term, until civil discontent and monetary policy iron things out in their cyclical fashions.

In the startup community, it is generally lauded that the hot concern is, 'how do I use finance and technology to become a technocrat at the top of the political-economic pyramid as it grows steeper and narrower at the top?' This is a valid concern, but it is so popular that personally, I find it a little boring.

Back to my commercial research interests. I'm mainly concerned about the short term manifestation of these secular effects of automation. I think we are going to see a lot of people falling into low-income categories, and the question then is, 'how can we take an excess of labour hours, and turn it into value for the majority of the population?'. I think it's a valuable concern, which lends a semblance of balance to the hot concern.

That is the nature of the startup I am working on.

This post is a follow-up to this one.

* In terms of motivations, I come from a background of being somewhat (though not completely) disinterested in climbing the ladders of financial wealth accumulation, and prestige. Though I do believe I have unusual (and possibly useful) insights in the field of phenomenology and hence machine intelligence, I've generally been quite happy to stay out of work in those areas as the trends in those fields to-date focus more on the problem of computation than on the problem of data structures (which is where I think my own insights add value).

** I agree, to a rather extreme degree - I think that the holy grail isn't just machines that perform customer service and day-trading better than humans. A much more valuable target we will soon achieve is when machines perform sex, and love, and friendship, and early childhood education, and life coaching, and talent management... and do it better and cheaper than 99% of available human talent.