Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, AI has dominated business news feeds. Nvidia stock is up 871%, a quarter of Y-Combinator startups report that AI produces nearly all of their code, and AI-related startups took in 71% of all U.S. VC funding in Q1 2025. There is no question. The AI hype train is barreling full-steam-ahead.

Recently, while attending an engagement party of some friends, I found myself talking with the MD of a large wealth management fund at a well-known multinational bank. To my surprise, he was vehemently short on AI. This seasoned investor compared Nvidia to IBM in the late '90s and predicted significant growth reversal over the next decade. He lamented current AI hype and posited that people are burning their money by investing in AI at current valuations. He told me to study some history and predicted that we are nearing March 10, 2000 on the dotcom bubble graph.

This MD isn't the only one. A popular, anonymous X account run by an acquaintance of mine has repeatedly called the current AI landscape one big ponzi scheme and insinuates that retail investors will be left holding the bag. Plenty of smart, successful people doubt AI is worthy of the current investment and attention it is receiving. Time will tell if the skeptics are right, but I maintain that we are in the early stages of the second industrial revolution—even possibly on the precipice a historical singularity.

To those who are short on AI, I want to make a prediction: in a decade from now, food insecurity will be an issue of the past. Unless a catastrophic disaster sets current technological progress back, a major world war erupts, or wicked regimes deliberately block the advancement of technology, no one on earth will ever have to go hungry again. If you're short on AI, you are probably asking, how's that?

Enter AI.

Years ago, Elon Musk made a bold bet. He bet that self-driving cars would be achieved through vision-based machine learning instead of the then-dominant approach of trying to achieve it through a combination of LiDAR sensors, rule-based programming, and high-definition maps. As a result, Tesla poured billions of dollars into AI development. They collected massive amounts of real-world driving data (basically thousands of hours of videos from Tesla cameras) and built out a neural-network training infrastructure that transformed the raw footage into the vision-based AI system that powers Tesla's self-driving features today.

To the ire of his many haters and doubters, Mr. Musk and Tesla accomplished the impossible. They successfully proved that cars can be taught to drive themselves using vision-based machine learning. Pretty amazing. At this point though, you are probably asking: "So what does any of this have to do with ending food insecurity?" Well, just stay with me a little longer.

If cars can be trained to autonomously complete advanced driving maneuvers—merging lanes, obeying traffic laws, and making sudden stops—robots will be soon be able to do amazing things too. Dozens of companies are now following in Tesla's footsteps and are using real world footage to develop vision-based AI systems for robots. It won't be long before autonomous robots are farming fields at home and abroad. They'll have a fixed up front cost, require energy to power them, and need maintenance from time to time—but labor laws won't apply to these robots. They won't need wages, sleep, food, water, safe working conditions, time off, etc. They will just work. Costs of production will plummet not only in the farming industry (which I am using only as an example) but in mining, manufacturing, food processing, packaging, and more.

In coming years, it will become technologically feasible (infrastructure is a whole different convo) for food to be autonomously farmed, transported, processed, packaged, and even delivered directly to homes in remote parts of the world. As reliance on humans to produce food and other goods begins to decline, and eventually approaches 0, the main prevailing cost will just be energy. In other words, the cost of food (and most other producible goods) should begin to converge on the cost of energy. Vast amounts of energy are required to train these vision-AI models, to power autonomous vehicles and robots, etc. If we can't produce enough energy to support these emerging markets, costs will be too high for this kind of a world to be feasible (I'll leave my thoughts on that for another article).

The phrase "AI is coming for your job" gets thrown around a lot. And rightfully, it scares people. I think it's only scary because most people don't understand what "AI coming for my job" even means. While it is true that many of today's jobs will be automated by robots operating on vision-based AI systems within the next decade, those same robots will be the reason quality food and other material goods are affordably accessible to everyone—even the poor. I don't think anyone needs to be scared. New markets will emerge and those with high agency will have more resources than at any other time in human history to accomplish grand things. "Work" in 100 years will be astonishingly different than what it looks like today.