The Small Group

I was sitting in the back of a taxi a little after midnight, having just landed in Abu Dhabi. The window was open, and the warm air carried that extraordinary smell of the desert after rain—wet earth, dust and something suddenly in bloom.

We had come to show people what was probably the most ambitious thing I had ever tried to build. The idea was a distributed resource hub that could produce the basic things people need where they live: solar power, clean water, food and Wi-Fi connectivity and form a network of resources that could be resilient and independent Instead of continually shipping necessities from somewhere else, give communities more ability to produce those things themselves.

The ambition was enormous. The group behind it was tiny. There was me, my brilliant partner in Louisiana and his engineering team, a military general, and a group of Marine veterans from Camp Pendleton. Industrial workers knew how to build it. Veterans knew how to deploy it. We thought we could put the pieces together.

The project has not yet succeeded.

The idea persists.

Years earlier, I had been part of another small group with a very different ambition.

We wanted to make a television show. When we created Fast Money at CNBC, there was no great institutional plan behind it. I was working with the smartest and most creative television producer I had ever known from Bloomberg, who came over to CNBC to work with me. We had the traders, a couple of senior executives willing to give us room, and a handful of people trying to make financial television feel alive.

We made the show.

Fast Money became one of the enduring successes in financial television and continues today. One idea became a television show that is still running. The other remains unfinished. Both began with a few people who believed something could exist that didn’t exist yet.

I keep coming back to that.

I’ve spent the past few weeks writing about artificial intelligence, the financial crisis, political monopoly, government debt, the Federal Reserve and the bond market. They matter. But almost none of us can do much about them tomorrow morning.

And tomorrow morning still comes. We talk about society as though it happens in Washington. But most people don’t experience “society.” They experience other people.

Someone gives you your first opportunity. Someone teaches you something. Someone older knows something you don’t. Someone younger is willing to try something you’ve stopped believing is possible. A society still has to answer some old questions. How does a young person find a place in the world and become useful? How does someone without money or power get a chance? How does an older person remain useful and pass on what they know?

Young people have energy, time and new ideas. Older people have experience, relationships and often capital.

Put them in the same room.

This is where AI gets interesting. AI could concentrate wealth and power on a scale we’ve never seen. It can also give small groups capabilities that once belonged only to large institutions: research, software, design, accounting, media and distribution.

A company that once required a hundred people may require ten. An idea that once required millions of dollars and institutional permission may increasingly require a few capable people.

AI could make monopoly stronger.

It could also make the small group extraordinarily powerful. In Abu Dhabi, we were trying to distribute physical capability: power, water, food and communications.

Maybe now we can distribute human capability.

Knowledge. Capital. Creativity. Production. Opportunity.

But there is something more important than economics underneath all of this.

People need to be needed. A universal income check can keep somebody alive. It cannot give them a reason to get out of bed. A government can transfer money. It cannot manufacture friendship, competence, trust or the feeling that somebody is counting on you.

Those aren’t questions about productivity.

They’re questions about meaning.

We don’t have to wait for Washington or Silicon Valley to answer them.