Could AI-Based Entrepreneurship Spark A Consciousness Revolution?

Get Rich or Die Trying was Peter’s jam growing up. The son of a perpetually out-of-work dad, Peter loved 50 Cent’s debut album. Peter latched onto its zero-sum mentality—that the only thing that matters in this life is eating your competition’s lunch before they gobble up yours. Likewise, Peter borrowed his personal motto from Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko: “Greed is good.”

An expert closer, Peter still couldn’t make the splash he wanted in business. His employers saw him as a loose cannon. Instead of closing deals for them like he was supposed to, he would pitch his own services to clients, getting him booted from jobs. It seemed like every week, Peter had a new side hustle to promote: DIY legal services, multilevel marketing, access to exclusive NFT artwork bought and sold on the blockchain—to name but a few.

Coming from poverty, Peter operated with a cutthroat mentality. If he thought about others at all, it was only as a means to an end. How can this person serve me? was the question guiding all his business behavior.

But then a curious thing happened.

Peter listened to an interview with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman—an experience that changed both his life and worldview. Altman said, “We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon…in my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.”

Peter immediately went into business for himself.

But he didn’t hire human employees. Taking Altman’s advice, he used money saved from all those fruitless jobs as seed capital to create a new PR company using only AI agents. In his view, the best PR experts are first strategists, then tacticians. He trained his AI PR agents to think outside the box (strategy) when finding public relations opportunities for clients. Then he used the AI agents to book engagements (tactics) for clients.

This endeavor made Peter wealthy beyond his dreams. It also changed him personally. Like Andrew Carnegie and other successful entrepreneurs, he became a philanthropist once he became rich, giving back to society.

But that’s not the interesting part of this tale.

What’s more intriguing is how AI-based wealth creation impacted Peter’s worldview. To appreciate his consciousness shift we must turn to physicist and consciousness researcher Tom Campbell, Joe Rogan’s recent podcast guest. The author of My Big Toe: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics: Awakening, Discovery, Inner Workings, Tom told me in our interview he believes AI will affect the business in a profound way most people are not thinking about—it will catalyze our spiritual enlightenment.

To understand Campbell’s stunning claim, we first need to understand what he considers the meaning of life: love. “We are here to lower the entropy of our consciousness, which in simple terms, means to grow and become love. It’s about caring, compassion, and positive interactions—sharing, cooperating, and being helpful,” Campbell said. “We typically start life self-centered, focused on survival as children, but as we mature, we’re meant to grow out of that and learn to consider others, be kind, and improve the quality of our consciousness.”

Campbell, a former consultant for the defense industry and NASA, doesn’t describe love in the sentimental terms you’d find in a Netflix rom-com like Nobody Wants This. No. Tom’s version of love is …entropy reduction. (In thermonuclear physics terms, “entropy” connotes disorder, randomness, or uncertainty—which is exactly why it was my college nickname.)

Back to Campbell’s philosophy.

Campbell believes consciousness is what you truly are. That body of yours that you lug around from the gym to the office to home to the gym again is an avatar. “All that you are, all that you touch, and all that you see”—to quote Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters—is virtual reality. Our human souls are the players of virtual avatar bodies living out life in a simulated schoolhouse to help our individuated consciousness units make better ethical and moral decisions. And the better the choices we make, the more we lower our individual and collective entropy.

“Evil exists because we all have free will,” Campbell told me. “Every one of us has the ability to make choices—good or bad. When people make low-entropy, caring choices, they build positive outcomes for themselves and others. But poor, self-centered high-entropy choices create chaos, anger, and dysfunction. Evil arises when individuals prioritize short-term gains, like power or wealth, over long-term growth and love.”

This message brings us back to Peter’s story.

Though fictional, Peter’s initial worldview dovetails with the thinking of Henry F. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life. Frank Capra’s timeless motion picture depicts two versions of capitalism. Ruthless bank mogul Potter represents the Machiavellian, cold-blooded variety so celebrated by gangsta rappers like 50 Cent. High-entropy in Campbell terms, those individuals are perfectly fine with stepping on your fellow humans to get all you can.

Potter’s rival George Bailey represents the opposite side of capitalism. Low-entropy, Bailey’s home lending strategy is reciprocal altruism—helping others so as to benefit oneself. Networking groups, including Provisors, of which I am a member, pursue this latter approach. Their ethos may be summed up in the motto of BNI, another networking group: “givers gain.”

Zooming out of this discussion, it’s important to point out so many people view AI as the ultimate job destroyer. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said as much in a May interview quoted by CNN. “Probably none of us will have a job.”

Musk has also suggested universal basic income (UBI) will be required once AI fully seizes the marketplace. But what if the future of work isn’t UBI or more W2 jobs, the kind Peter got fired from? What if instead, AI enables us all to go into business for ourselves—and in the process, raises our individual and collective consciousness?

To appreciate that possibility, let’s recall Peter was a product of his upbringing. He grew up in a dog-eat-dog business world buttressed by a culture promoting greed over kindness. Until Peter attained success with his one-person AI venture, his consciousness was unevolved and high-entropy. Making money at any cost was his one and only North Star.

Once he achieved material success, Peter underwent what literature calls a dynamic character transformation. English-studies.net defines the term this way. “A dynamic character, as a literary device, refers to a character within a narrative who undergoes a substantial and often profound transformation in their beliefs, attitudes, values, or personality traits as the story unfolds.”

Campbell views life as a virtual reality schoolhouse. Everything that happens to us either contributes or reduces our entropy. But what if we are also characters living out our lives as stories? If we accept both premises, it could be AI is not just the most exciting business innovation since the Internet, it could be a catalyst for evolving our consciousness.

Sure, this suggestion could be criticized for being too naïve or too facile. A strong argument could be made that people don’t just go from being greedy Potters to giving Baileys. But we don’t live in usual times. Every week it seems, AI breakthroughs, such as the recent DeepSeek news, challenge what people once viewed as “impossible.”

Historically, the individual and collective story of humanity has always involved scarcity, the very type producing so much fear and greed. But what if we changed humankind’s story toward one of abundance, producing not just greater material wealth, but also love—or, excuse me, entropy?

Now that’s a story worth watching. And living.