Should I Quit and Start a Franchise?

When Bing-Terminator edition comes along and takes our jobs, I will be sitting pretty. You see, I’m going to pivot my career from writing newsletters to slinging chicken nuggets. My master plan—own a Chick-fil-A. I figure that when our robot overlords rise up, they will still crave the savory tang of Polynesian sauce, the sweet smoothness of a peppermint shake. We won’t need any more tech writers, but we will still need people who can deliver a perfectly crunchy waffle fry.

I’m being a little facetious, but AI making knowledge workers redundant is happening right now. My sense is that, even with all the hype, analysts are still underestimating how disruptive these text-generation models are. In my research, I’ve held calls with doctors, university professors, engineers, salesmen, and magazine editors. They all confess, in hushed tones, that they are secretly using ChatGPT to do some of their work for them. None of their colleagues have been able to tell though. (My guess is that their colleagues are secretly doing the same.) It has allowed them to do less work while receiving the same pay. In fact, a working paper out of MIT came out this morning showing an experiment where white collar workers given access to ChatGPT finished a task 35% faster.

In my first piece on this new tech, I argued that “AI takes content creation to zero.” At the time, most of my readers took me to mean that content creators would become unemployed. This is not an expansive enough view. A more accurate way to think about it: If you type on a keyboard, AI makes you redundant.

In the short term, it will only make some of us less redundant. Think of it in terms of farming—in 1850, farm labor was 4.9M people, or ~64%, of the U.S.'s 7.7M workers. Today, there are only 2.6M farmers, or 1.3% of the United States labor force, but these farmers make exponentially more food using modern technology such as tractors, GMOs, etc. A similar phenomenon applies to anyone who types for a living. Much fewer people will be required to create even more output than before.

It is therefore reasonable in the face of this coming white-collar doom to try to hedge. This brings us back to Chick-fil-A. As my scale would tell you, I tend to eat my feelings. Last week, in the midst of an existential AI crisis, I sat in a parking lot, staring down at a half-devoured Spicy Deluxe Chicken Sandwich, and wondered, “Should I just do this instead?”

We are talking stocks here

Let’s say I came to you and pitched the most incredible stock opportunity. You could be owning early shares of the next Apple or Facebook or Google! You’ll be rich! The only itsy bitsy, tiny little thing is that ownership would have the following requirements:

5 years of manual labor
75%+ of your net worth is on the line
You can obtain loans for this investment, but you are personally liable for them
You can sell the stock only when the company says they are cool with it
It is in a sector that is considered one of the riskiest in the entire world

This is not a stock. This is what is required to be a franchisee. You would likely respond to my proposition, “I do not want to do that thing because I do not snort glue.” (Wise response.) However, someone has made this exact choice 498,234 times in the United States.