I'd love to.
Here's another little plug on work that I've been doing. Vivic Research did some work with Policy Horizons, which is the foresight think tank in the federal government looking at how key technological changes may change the competition landscape.
The question you're raising points to some of the preliminary thinking we're doing on this, because with the rise of certain technologies—in particular, AI—there's inevitably going to be displacement. It's an unfortunate reality of competition that some businesses will go extinct. That churn is part of a healthy competitive environment. What we need to watch out for—and it's something that kept coming up again in our work—is that these technological advancements tend to have a lot of the same dynamics as the business models we're seeing today, like social media platforms and the rise of big data, where you get a snowballing effect that naturally leads to dominant firms.
The big question that policy-makers are going to have to grapple with is not only what we're going to do with folks that are competed out of the market, but also how we grapple with the displacement of economic value as a result. That includes not only small and medium-sized businesses, but also workers.
It's a bit easier to think it through with workers. If AI is going to replace my job, where am I going to go? How am I going to make a living if the economic value that I used to gain from doing that job is now being captured by an AI program owned by Google?
There is this shift in who is capturing the economic value of different activities in the market. There is a very real reality that this economic value is going to continue to be amalgamated by large, dominant digital players in our economy.
The churn is one part of the story. I think the flip side of that dynamic is where the value is that the company was generating. Where has that value gone? Who is getting that value, and how are we ensuring that the value is being shared within the economy in a way that is allowing us to meet all our needs and allowing all of us to participate in the economy in an autonomous, self-directed way?