Is This the Moment Tech Nerds Take Over the World?
Standing in the crowd at the Starship launch, I was struck by how many people were completely taken with the technology. Engineers, families, retirees, kids. Nobody was cynical. Everyone was optimistic about what comes next. It got me thinking about work and business, and about a question I can't quite shake: who is going to hold the most power going forward? I suspect it's shifting toward the people who understand technology.
Where power has always lived
For most of history, power has gone to three kinds of people: those who could manage other people, those who controlled resources, and those who held a lot of assets. Kings, generals, landowners, factory owners, executives. The common thread is that they directed large amounts of human effort or large amounts of stuff.
The inversion
That is starting to move. A technologist managing a fleet of AI agents is managing a great deal of intelligence, a great deal of work, and a great deal of data. And data is itself an asset and a resource.
So the three old sources of power are starting to collapse into one skill: understanding and directing technology systems. Power is moving from the people who manage many workers in human form to the people who manage many workers in agent form. And the curves on the agent side are exponential.
Who produces the value now
The people getting the most done right now, and producing the most economic value, are the ones who have made themselves ten times more productive and are trying to get to a thousand. Certain individuals can now do ten or a hundred times what they could before. A lot of the innovation and the good ideas are coming from the people who run these systems.
I want to be careful here, because this matters: plumbers, HVAC technicians, and people who do physical work still have immense value. Nobody's agent is going to crawl into your attic in August. That work is not going away, and the people who do it well are not losing ground.
In fact, I think the strongest combination of all is someone who can do physical work, understands raw materials and engineering, and understands the underlying technology.
What that looks like from the inside
I work on an engineering team, and this is my own experience. I can take a problem and bring my hands and my mind to it, along with intelligence resources, access to data, and tools. When the right tool doesn't exist, I make it. I write my own software and have it built right away.
That means no outside software dependencies, no licensing negotiations, no annual fees. I don't need a big budget. For most of my career I had to be extremely resourceful just to get around the barriers. Now the barriers are mostly gone, and all that resourcefulness finally has room to run.
Nerds, or hybrids?
So is this the moment the tech nerds take over the world? I'm honestly not sure the word is "nerds." When I look at my own example, the person who seems to win is the hybrid: the engineer who understands the shop floor and the materials, and who can also direct a room full of agents.
Maybe that's the real shift. Not one group replacing another, but the people who can connect the physical world to the new intelligence becoming the ones who shape what gets built.
Who has the most power in the future? I keep coming back to the technologists. I'm curious whether you see it the same way.