I'm 18 and from Ethiopia (a third-world country). I'm interested in AI automations — would you recommend learning another high-income skill and building capital/soft skills first before entering the space, or should I start directly if it doesn't require much capital? ($500 here is worth about $10K+ in local buying power.)

Go directly into automations. There's no higher-income skill as of right now — it's a massive, exploding industry. Your buying-power arbitrage (roughly 20x in Ethiopia's case) means automation delivers a much higher quality of life per dollar earned, but that doesn't make it 20x easier — you'll face real friction, since a lot of people, especially in the West, look down on offshore workers from Ethiopia, Africa, the Philippines, or India due to unfair assumptions about work quality or English skills, even though that's silly. You'll also struggle at first because you don't have much business experience to know what to automate — you'll learn that through trial and error, but it'll make you a better business owner faster than something like copywriting, a traditional agency, or a cleaning business would. Even in the West, this skill delivers an extra 10-20x multiple on your time; the moment you land a client paying $2,000/month, that's roughly $40,000/month in US buying-power equivalent for you.