The rise of remote work and other online gigs has created the illusion among many young people that they are their own bosses. From my observation, you can only call yourself your own boss if you own the customer. Whoever owns the customer data is the boss.
A guy with a youtube channel might think that he is self-employed. But Youtube can demonetize his channel at will or even terminate it.
A freelancer working on fiverr, freelancer, upwork etc might think that he is his own boss but it only takes a few mistakes to get booted out of the platform.
Uber drivers can get suspended by Uber at any time. Uber owns the customer and data. The drivers are just pseudo employees disguised as independent contractors.
If you don’t own the customer information, you are more of an employee than a business owner. If you depend heavily on a privately owned platform to reach your customers, you are just a glorified employee.
NB: This post does not discuss income. Many employees earn more money than independent business owners. It is about control over the business.
Kuna jamaa wanaitwa Fresh and Fit walihustle sana hadi channel yao ya Youtube ikagrow to over 1M subscribers and they were one of the leading podcasts. Youtube iliwademonetize ikachukua kama 95% of their income after slaving for years to build the brand.
A graphic designer on fiverr controls his working hours and does not need anyone’s permission to leave work. Yet, anaweza amka kesho apate account imefungwa and he has no way of reaching his customers.
Another graphic designer sells his services through his website. Hawezi amka kesho apate hana job instantly. He has more control over his business. He has all the customer details and information so he can always retarget them and even have a mailing list.
One person is a business owner and the other person is an “employee” disguised as an independent contractor.
Drivers wa hizi apps watatii pia. Kufungiwa account ni kama tuu kufutwa kazi especially kama one platform contributes more than half of the guy’s income.
If you earn more than half of your income from one platform, you are exposed.
Hata sellers wa Amazon, ebay etc. Despite having thousands of positive customer reviews, Amazon ikiamua kufunga account seller ndiye ataumia. The customer is loyal to the platform, not the seller.
Kuna models hupata depression wkaifungiwa onlyfans ama IG juu they learn very quickly that they are employees and can be fired.
The key is versatility. You need to have a variety of sellable skills such that when you’re demonetized from one platform bado you can jump onto the next one. It’s the new version of job-hopping.
I genuinely think the future is one person businesses. With AI, a ten-person company will be able to make billions in profits with very little overhead. These small person billion dollar operations are the future.
People should try to inter-marry their skills with AI. If you can 1000X your output by the help of AI, there’s no reason you can’t individually run a billion dollar operation just by yourself.
I’m putting my hand where my mouth is by learning how to build AI agents in my field to help verify analog designs and PCBs. Imagine hundreds of agents deployed to the cloud running computations that would take me hours in just a few seconds or minutes?
I know it sounds crazy, almost delusional (almost unimaginable) to suggest that but I really believe that’s where we’re heading to.
For example, an academic writer based in Kenya needs to figure out how to build agents to quickly generate citations from research platforms like Jstor etc, generate appropriate templates and perfectly generate papers in the desired format (MLA, APA, Chicago style etc etc). The writing process would take maybe 2 hours instead of a whole night thereby 10Xing individual output. Instead of writing 5 papers a week, now it becomes 50 papers a week. Money overflows. People should get into AI. There are so many resources now.
One person billion dollar operations are the future!
Mkabete, it doesn’t work like that. AI written articles are shunned upon in the academic arena, maybe it would do good to fictional writers. While some items you’ve mentioned are true, sometimes it’s hard to achieve those levels of production that you’ve projected
No no no. AI won’t be generating the articles. AI will just be helping with the citation process. 60% of writing is usually proper citation. For that, you have to manually go online and look for publications and read through them to get the meat that you can use to support whatever claims you’re making. This can be AI generated.
There’s so many applications for it. In fact, there’s a startup that’s already doing it: https://jenni.ai/
They’re now at $5M ARR and they even have $5M ama ni $10M of funding. Opportunities are there. Dozens of AI companies are being funded everyday. It’s not easy for sure but it’s another avenue that you can get into.
Wewe ni mjinga boss. The definition of employee is legally defined with accompanying responsibilities and rights of both employee and employer. Do you think the professions you’ve listed fall under these categories?
Acha kucatch weh nongwe. Just accept that your shitpost was ill thought.
Secondly everyone who is not retarded knows that gig economy work is unstable. I don’t know if you live under a rock but there are many protests and government interventions all over the world to push for them to get more worker rights and guarantees. I don’t know why you act like it’s something profound you’ve had an epiphany for. Lol.
With this level of thinking, ata utasema landlord boss wake ni kanjo. Alafu useme kanjo boss wake ni Sakaja. Sakaja boss wake ni Ruto. Ruto boss wake ni Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping boss wake ni Biden. Biden boss wake ni Jamie Dimon. Jamie Dimon boss wake ni Kristalina Georgiev… etc etc
The reality is we live in a world where we are all dependent on each other, so let’s respect each other and not look down on others even if you are their boss
There are multiple tools ya ku insert citations and references, according to MLA, Chicago, etc.
Formating huwa si shida. The actual pain is in the writing process, English, translating the research material to points, avoiding plag, and now, avoiding robotic writing (AI).
Most kenyan writers never read the material. But Ai inaezasaidia to summarize pdfs and highlight important points
I agree with you. Ai can be leveraged in unforeseen ways.
Hizo Ai agents ni nini? Any learning resource or links uzitume hapa
I like how we are in this “ai bubble” everything is termed as AI, true AI developers wanacheka sana, so here is the catch.
WE ARE STILL FAR AWAY FROM BUILDING A FULLY FUNCTIONAL AI
What you guys call AI are just master systems and they have been around from the 80’s
If I lived in silicon valley and wanted to be a millionaire quick I would build an “AI” that can analyze customer data in retail notice how long the take before coming to buy the same product again create a prediction and send them a sms/email telling them that their particular item is on offer. I would bring AI(masters system again) into retail/store advertising that is sure to get investors throwing money at me.