Heed The Wait Calculation: Strategy From Ethan Mollick

Here’s the first thing to explain – I’m getting this term, ‘wait calculation’, from an essay by notable MIT grad and author Ethan Mollick early this year, as I look at a brand-new X post by the same expert on what AI can now do as we prepare to enter 2025.

But I’m going to start with the X post itself, verbatim:

“Claude, change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. … Do them in order, do not skip any.”

Let me back up a little bit.

The Essential Math: Wait for Change

In his January 2024 blog post, Mollick pointed out his idea through introducing a simple choice:

If you’re going to travel to a destination in deep space, and it’s going to take you 12,000 years with the current technology – do you set off on that trip, or wait a few hundred years on earth until the technology advances?

This in turn reminds me of the super-popular “Three Body Problem” series by Cixin Liu that brought a Chinese author’s take on science fiction to a broad American audience.

In the books, when humans undertake to travel to far-away parts of the universe where alien life exists, they dehydrate their bodies, and put themselves into temporary, if lengthy, sleep, to be reconstituted at their destination.

A character quoted in those books makes the following statement (not verbatim):

“When a fish came on land, it ceased to be a fish. When a human travels into the reaches of space , they cease to be human.”

This concise screed to evolution speaks of going beyond the bounds of what has been possible in the past. That’s where we now are with AI, in a way.

For instance, if the next generations are equipped with high-tech cyborg equipment, enhancing their senses and capabilities, are they still fully human?

Anyway, Mollick brings up the fundamental premise that many things we were doing over the 20th century have now become functionally obsolete.

The Collapse of Work

This argument isn’t just about job displacement. It’s not about what robots will do instead of humans in the future. It’s about all of the work that people were doing in the 1980s, in the 1990s, in the oughts and the teens, right up to today.

Say you were building a novel physical therapy program, or researching cancer cures, or brainstorming media campaigns, or doing any kind of cognitive work that makes progress in an industry. Mollick is essentially arguing that you could’ve just waited, and used today’s technology to do it a lot faster, and you’d end up further ahead than we currently are.

“I have spent much of the last decade or so trying to build games to help people learn and innovate,” he writes. “And all of that work suddenly became compressed, warped, and accelerated as a result of the release of ChatGPT and its successors last year. The teams I worked with did valuable research, and the effort produced teaching experiences with real impact, but, at some point, if we could have anticipated the evolution of AI, we could have waited.”

He does, however, point out that to get to this point, we really had to do the cognitive work that we did to discover the technologies themselves.

So in the end, it might be sort of a Catch-22 thing. But here’s another very important component of this idea that I want to emphasize …

AI: Progress on Physical and Cognitive Tasks

Here’s the thing – so many times, when you talk to someone about AI, they seem to have a moment of uncertainty or fear, but they console themselves with the idea that although AI is a superbly capable thinker, it’s not good at physical tasks yet.

On the other hand, those of us with the front row seat to the industry recognize that AI robots can already do things like (just like Mollick said) pitch manure, or change a diaper.

Robot dexterity is advancing rapidly, just like AI cognition. We’re just not seeing the robots on the street in the same way that we see ChatGPT in a browser. I submit that all of that is going to change not in years, but in months.

So we’ll see. We’ll batten down and enjoy the new year holiday, but as the month of January unfolds, we’ll be seeing so much more, as companies and innovators race to take advantage of everything that the technology has to offer.

And in the end, what the technology has to offer is practically everything.