(I wrote this the other morning before hearing about a similarly titled article making its rounds, for the nerds who were about to message me as such.)
I remember February 2020. I was in Reno at a friend’s birthday party when a friend and I started talking about this Coronavirus thing we kept hearing about. I vividly remember his words.
“We are so not prepared for this.”
Something was happening, and we were either clueless, ignorant, or overconfident about its impact on our lives.
Seeing what I see now, something is happening with AI. It’s no longer just a cool toy or a way to pump out content. It’s getting better and better. The tools and applications leveraging it are accelerating. People in my circles are deploying it in increasingly ambitious ways. Tasks are changing — numerous hardcore software developers have completely abandoned writing code themselves. We’re seeing a lot of “funny and weird” things — moltbook being one example — that are easy to initially dismiss as a funny blip, but on second thought, maybe worth paying closer attention to. I’ve made AI-generated songs so good the listener only realizes when they hear their name mentioned. And there are whispers that in much smaller circles, in the depths of leading AI companies and labs, the advancements are thrilling.
I think we’re well past the point of this being nothing — just hype. Even if existing models didn’t advance beyond their current capabilities, we’re already due for seismic shifts. We’re already at the point where every message, video, song, image, spoken word — our means of conscious communication — is easily created by anyone with an internet connection. We’re already at the point where the millions of person-hours that went into creating some of the largest software platforms can be replicated by someone typing a prompt on his MacBook Pro, then going for a walk. It would be, at this point, pure idiocy to assume we’re going to see anything other than seismic shifts in entire industries, job categories, and daily tools — it’s just not fully adopted or accepted yet.
It goes further. There’s been a long-hypothesized phenomenon referred to as the singularity, where AI surpasses human intelligence, triggering a cascading effect of change. What was once a fun table topic for nerds about some far-off science fiction future is, as some believe, at our doorstep. Maybe it’s already here, just not publicized.
I’ve tempered my excitement around AI, as my overzealousness over the last “big thing” — crypto — quickly deflated (for now), stinging me in multiple ways. I, and others, believed we were riding a tidal wave that never materialized. So I’ve been hesitant to write anything, as this could still be a wave that quickly dissipates, again leaving us with some good everyday tools and a minuscule cohort of diehard zealots. We also have to realize, expect, and welcome our natural defense mechanism to dismiss and ignore, as that is a lot easier than facing down a tidal wave heading toward us — as we could have seen in February 2020.
I find myself going through my day at times wondering, “What’s the point if things are about to change?” Not as a fatalistic mindset — just grappling with the reality of building on ground that is months away from tectonic disruption. Established beliefs about priorities and goals might be rendered meaningless in short order.
Some are in a mad cash grab in their businesses, assuming the well will run dry soon. Others are focusing on hard assets. Others are shouting at you to AI-pill yourself as fast as possible.
So what is my advice? My guidance for myself and invitation for you?
In the Talmud, there’s a passage:
“A person should always be soft and flexible like a reed, and not hard and unbending like a cedar.”
Or the Zen saying: “The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.”
Feel free to copy and paste either of those lines into your favorite LLM and ask it for the appropriate wood-related passage in whatever wisdom tradition you’re digging these days. Let’s just roll with the idea that rigidity has always been seen as a source of suffering.
Something is happening that, as I and others believe, will apply more force to us than most anything we’ve yet encountered as a species.
I hope we all bend and flow, and not snap and break while clinging to how things were and should be.
Love.