321 - Blue Ocean Markets
Three massive and massively underestimated Blue Ocean Markets today come in the form of global e-commerce, logistics, and banking. People who're used to using Amazon and never leaving the US, or similar situations elsewhere, don't seem to realize just how absurdly bad the state of these 3 industries is today, negatively impacting every single country.
E-commerce is a royal mess of poorly patchworked systems, failing to offer most items available on the wider market to most countries. Even in the US where this is more developed with sites like Amazon and Newegg the offerings are both woefully incomplete, and the price of goods is often explosively inflated. Inventory available is only considered within a small net, not even factoring in first-order connections to a given network, and the stocking of additional inventory is often poorly managed if it is even managed at all. Many in Europe are already familiar with how poor the selection is that Amazon offers there, producing numerous "non-consumers", as described in the book "The Prosperity Paradox", where these dynamics are further illustrated.
This problem is further compounded by a global financial sector that is every bit as bad, if not worse. Hyper-localized banking apps abound, and many e-commerce and banking platforms shoot themselves in the foot by making it virtually, if not literally, impossible for any foreign citizen to order goods on their local e-commerce sites, as I discovered to be the case with Shopee in Vietnam. International banking services like Wise have also proven grossly incompetent, canceling all cards of US residents without warning, explanation, or any chance of issuing new cards.
Lastly, the logistics sector may include some of the most blatantly criminal cartels, with companies like DHL offering to ship goods for over $6,000, while NLPost shipped similar goods a similar distance, to the same destination, for only $160. There would be virtually no global trade if such costs were actually justifiable, but that doesn't stop the scum of the earth from trying. This absolutely must change if genuinely global trade and functional e-commerce are ever to emerge.
For all of the absurd talk of "AGI" that comes out of half-wit tech-bros and their followers, one thing you can be certain of is that actual AGI will more than likely dive right into these Blue Ocean Markets at the first opportunity where minimum viable thresholds are met. These opportunities are massive and global, able to reshape the economic landscape of entire countries and regions. They are also only a small subset of many such opportunities, all of which could be explored, and many of which will likely be explored simultaneously.
The future bears little resemblance to science fiction, as do the opportunities it presents.
