Thoughts from our founder.
This morning, I listened to a podcast with a 23-year-old from SF that is growing 10% a day, yes, a day, talking about how a new agent can look at your wardrobe and suggest what you should wear on certain days.
I put it on pause as the implications raced through my head. Take the dress case, for many women, the pleasure, the daily pleasure of life, includes getting dressed, choosing. How am I gonna look today? Does this look nice? Husband, boyfriend, how do I look? This is a part of what makes life interesting, and all of a sudden all we are hearing is: Hey, technology can do that, you don't need to do it. That is taking a pleasure out of life, one pleasure at a time, be it cooking, selecting the next CD, driving or whatever else can be automated. Those things you do that take time, and that time is the value.
So we have right now in Silicon Valley, a situation where many of the people which are working on AI are very young, younger on average than in previous booms, significantly younger as those are formative years. These ambitious brilliant men and women that are coming up with ideas, some of which will make it, some of which will not. But the overwhelming character of these new ideas is how we can automate another part of our lives.
So then the question is: if automation is two agents that mimic two individuals on a first date to see if they get along (and skip the date), haven't you taken a huge slice out of life? The slice where you learn? If automation is that a meal arrives perfectly cooked, haven't you taken the pleasure of cooking, and of enjoying that with a glass of wine, out of your life? If everything is delivered, where is the off chance you meet your love while buying milk?
We are on the precipice of making every interaction into an automation.
We are eradicating becoming.
I recently heard from one of our developers: "Look, I am extremely depressed. I'm no longer enjoying my life because I enjoyed my craft." DHH talks about this, and I agree with this point that we should embrace our new roles of makers not coders, but I also wonder how much agreeing with this point comes from our privileged position. People are gonna build on top Super Intelligence, but if we want to understand the frustration which is brewing up in society at the moment, I think we have to look at this from the perspective outside our bubble, and listen to people which are not in our tech circles and have an intrinsic human long term wisdom. That wisdom is telling them you are gonna take my life away. My life, lifestyle, my everything away, and they are reacting to that. And how could a concern be more valid than that? The natural concern that if you take the structure, the marrow, as Thoreau used to say, out of life, what do you end up with?
The end of becoming.