Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used to say that his company’s biggest competitor was Goldman Sachs. Yes, the investment bank. Gates’s point was that business success is a function of the people showing up to work each day, and Goldman was Microsoft’s most formidable foe in the battle for human capital.
It’s something to think about with small U.S. towns and rural communities top of mind. How will they function and grow economically if talented youth within those towns and communities continue to migrate to bigger cities and states near and far away?
The happy answer is that the solution to rural America’s present and future struggles hides in plain sight. Think the Artificial Intelligence, or AI revolution presently underway. It’s no reach to suggest that its most visible, economically stimulative impact will be felt in the towns and communities farthest (literally and figuratively) from Silicon Valley.
Amazon is scheduled to invest $100 billion this year in AI and AI-related technology, while Google and Microsoft are expected to add another $75 billion and $80 billion each. The economic meaning of all this investment will be profound and will arguably be felt in the least populated parts of the U.S. the most.
To see why, stop and think about what those closest to the AI boom are predicting. They foresee a scenario where most of the jobs of today will either be fully automated or mostly automated. Contemplate the meaning of this and think about it with the Gates anecdote that begins this opinion piece.
Assuming AI lives up to even a portion of its billed potential, a high number of jobs formerly handled by humans will be taken over by machines. Looked at through the prism of small and/or rural U.S. towns, their biggest economic challenge as “small” and “rural” indicates has long been the migration of their most talented and youngest citizens to bigger cities and states.
The AI revolution will reverse this talent drain, albeit in mechanized fashion. Politicians always talk about “bringing jobs back” to boost economic growth, but bringing back the past is tantamount to bringing back the very stagnation that repelled the talented in the first place. AI promises the brilliant mechanization of crucial, economy-enhancing work that formerly required humans. While Silicon Valley and Valley adjacent cities around the U.S. have long existed as a magnet for the best workers and mind in the U.S.’s smallest towns, AI advances will effectively shower on depopulated U.S. locales many multiples of the talent lost over the decades.
What this means for business owners and entrepreneurs well outside the major cities is that more and more they’ll have the equivalent of tens, hundreds and thousands of individuals working for them, day and night, 365 days a year. Businesses existentially threatened by a lack of skilled workers will soon find they can produce exponentially more with less.
Of note since it’s a major problem right now, the “rural hospital” that faces gradual extinction has the potential to be most revived by AI as administrative and physical functions are taken over by technological advances much more effectively, and of substantial importance, much less expensively. Such is the genius of technological progress.
As opposed to something that puts us out of work, technological progress makes the work we want and need to do increasingly possible. The skeptics among us view “Silicon Valley” as distant and elite, but as the valuations of Big Tech continue to show us, the impact of Valley advances is broadly felt. AI will reveal the previous truth in spades, and in the “forgotten” parts of the U.S. the most.
