In 2020, West Virginia University president E. Gordon Gee memorably quipped to the New York Times that he wanted “to build a wall around West Virginia and keep all the kids here. A state can’t flourish that can’t keep its young people there.” Gee was and is so right. People are what drive prosperity.
Call Artificial Intelligence (AI) a proxy for Gee’s wish, one that will be the economic equivalent of West Virginia not just retaining its own people, but much of the rest of the world’s genius at the same time. Such is the brilliance of technological advance.
Precisely because technology by its very name saves on labor, it’s the equivalent of adding talented workers on the extreme cheap. It all speaks to the extraordinary importance of AI that, while hatched out west, will lift West Virginia as though it was created right in Morgantown.
As legendary Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla explained last year, AI is poised to take over 80 percent of the work for 80 percent of the jobs that presently exist. Stop and think about the wondrous economic meaning of the latter for West Virginia’s economy.
As Gee’s quip made plain, the economic challenge West Virginia has long faced has been its inability to retain its human capital. Which means that even if AI lives up to even a fraction of the potential alluded to by Khosla, West Virginia’s economy will soar as workers in the state increasingly utilize technology that will automate not just the work that was formerly required of live humans, but crucially the thought.
It cannot be stressed enough that the prosperous effects of AI won’t be found in its creation, but in how humans utilize it. West Virginia has never lacked entrepreneurial vigor or creativity, but like so many U.S. states it’s long lacked substantial clusters of human talent so necessary to turn an entrepreneurial concept into a global business.
The above helps explain why California’s Silicon Valley remains a magnet not just for human capital, but also the investment that it’s matched with. That’s all about to be turned on its head. With AI and its automation of so much work and thought formerly done by humans, Silicon Valley is effectively exporting its clusters of human talent long coveted by investors.
West Virginia is poised to benefit impressively from this export. At present, West Virginia has a competitive tax rate, a great state university, not to mention a beautiful climate paired with a low cost of living that will make it attractive for WVU grads to remain in.
No longer required to go to where the talent is clustered, West Virginia’s best and brightest will be freer to innovate locally all the while relying on machines that will think and do in the way of Silicon Valley minus the historical high costs of hiring actual Valley workers.
It’s said that machines put us out of work, but it’s actually quite the opposite. What automates the work and thought of people frees actual people to greatly increase their own specialized work product.
In short, West Virginia’s greatest and most talented commercial minds are on the verge of being able to arm themselves with monstrously productive workers that will produce 24/7, 365 days a year, all without taking a vacation. Things are looking up.
