It’s Sunday and in the spirit of the weekend, here’s a somewhat off-topic post.
My kids are four and six. And like every other parent, I am anxious about what their lives look like when they are adults. Despite being 22 years into my career, I feel more lost than ever when trying to build a coherent model of what the future might look like.
So I have been reading, and writing. Three posts over the last month trying to make sense of where AI is taking us. They were not planned as a sequence, but they have an organic narrative.
The Spigot explores how we ended up with AI propping up the US economy. It starts with the first banner ad in 1994 and walks through how digital advertising became the most incredible business model we’ve ever seen. AI sits downstream of that money spigot.
Path Dependence looks at the behavior of the individuals at the AI frontier. Hassabis, Altman, Amodei, Musk: four men with very different stated worldviews who end up running the same race. Winner-take-all dynamics leave one viable strategy. The trigger was Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of Demis Hassabis, the most thoughtful figure at the frontier. Even he cannot escape the competitive dynamic.
The Two Drivers is what the impact outlined in the first two pieces looks like on the ground. Two Uber rides in Atlanta last month. A software engineering bootcamp graduate paying off a loan for a career that might never take off. An older driver squeezed by an algorithm whose rules keep changing in the name of optimization. Applied AI is already shaping their lives. Will AGI / ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) just accelerate this dynamic but at a higher scale?
Despite my enthusiasm for and embrace of AI, I am anxious. And as is my habit, I am trying to work things out by thinking and writing.
Read the posts if you are interested (links in the comments), or let me know what you are thinking.
Image is from Two Drivers, generated by ChatGPT’s new image model.
