Imagine a magical orchard. The first tree carries an abundance of low hanging, delicious apples. Lots of people are picking them, yet there seems to be no end of them. Higher up the tree, completely ignored, are some golden apples. Further into the orchard, if you walk through some long grass to get there, are trees laden with all sorts of jewels.
This is a good analogy for lots of technology fields, such as AI and biotech. Engineers can make a good income by addressing lucrative and easy markets, but in doing so they may be ignoring hugely valuable developments that need a little more effort.
As a personal strategy, if you are reasonably smart, you should pick the low hanging fruit. It’s easy and provides a good income. But if you’re smarter, you’ll let others pick those while you look for the more difficult for far more lucrative markets and exploit those instead.
I did ask GPT4 to illustrate this simple point, but it wasn’t very good at it, in fact, it’s hard to see how it could have understood it less. Exhibit 1, for your amusement:
