Culture is built on the stability of persistence.
Pop musicians have farewell tours that last for decades. The local print shop is still there, reliably getting the job done. We want things that last.
And yet…
When it’s time for a company to raise another round of investment, the smart investor treats the new round as if the old one never happened. Today, right now, is this the best use of my capital?
And the person at the buffet does the same thing. Right here, right now, which dish appeals the most?
We don’t get tomorrow over again. We can choose to spend it on the best option, not the option we committed to ten years ago.
At the lab, they don’t know the right answer. They are explorers and scientists. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. The work at the lab requires mutual support, shared information and a commitment to the process of discovery.
At the factory, the answer is known. It’s productivity that’s being pursued. Do it a little faster, a little better and a little more reliably than yesterday. Cut costs. Repeat.
And the dentist? It’s not rote work, but it’s not a dance with the unknown. Meet a client, diagnosis the problem and do the work efficiently as well. Different than yesterday, but it certainly rhymes.
Where do you work?
It could be that you’re getting exactly what you signed up for.
We called them this because they used tools. The first proto-humans to clearly do so.
The question that we need ask ourselves today, “Are you a tool user or a tool maker?”
Everyone uses tools. But only a few people, even with access to AI and systems of leverage, choose to make tools.
Part of the gap is failing to ask the question. It generally doesn’t occur to a productive tool user to decide to slow down, risk failure, and take responsibility by making a new tool.
But new tools are one way we change things for the better.
Homo Faciens
If you have a phone, you can call anyone you like. The recipient doesn’t have to answer, but the network is an open API, available to anyone. The Bell System began as an actual networked system–many companies, using the same protocol, shared calls with each other. When Bell got greedy and stopped interconnecting, phone use became annoying–several phones on your desk, or there were simply people you couldn’t call. AT&T interconnected when it was finally more profitable to own the standard than to block it, and the government mandate then locked that in and led to the phone system we have now.
Email caught on and persisted for the same reason, but more so. There was never “the email company.” Instead, there’s a protocol, and anyone can send and receive. For free.
It’s hard to overstate how profound the idea of permission-less contact was to the flow of information and the growth of commerce and culture. Just as you could mail a letter to a stranger, you could also call or email them. When it works, it’s very powerful.
Friction was the key. Stamps cost money. Phone calls required an account and a human to dial.
The first real challenge for most users wasn’t crank calls or wrong numbers. It was spammers. Computer users who would send thousands or millions of emails or phone calls at a time, taking advantage of asymmetry. It cost them nothing, but it cost each recipient something.
Usenet, the original internet discussion layer, died from this asymmetry. No one had an incentive to create filters or clean it up at scale, so people stopped showing up.
Even with free email, the first generations of spam were mostly uneconomic, and much of it was stopped by filters. No one liked the noise, but email was useful enough that we put up with some spam.
Multiply spam by AI and the cloud and VOIP, though, and it’s obvious that open networks can’t survive. 30 junk SMS notices in one day is more than enough to turn off your notifications. How many voicemails about an approved business loan need to show up before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes simply noise?
We’re going to need to create a cost for the sender (so it can’t scale to ridiculous) as well as an identity layer (so scammers can’t be fully anonymous–reputation is earned, not invented). It might be an open protocol in the spirit of the best parts of the net, or it might be a single monopolist that figures out how to extract value from it.
A thousand years ago, people built walls around their villages because criminal marauders with nothing to lose would destroy open cities. The scale of the new digital marauding is going to be so large (and it’s coming so fast) that we’re about to see a fundamental shift in how we contact each other and who we trust.
I have no idea what it looks like on the other side of this transition, but the assumptions we’ve always made about open communication with strangers are about to change.
We have no idea.
Of course, there’s plenty of behavioral data. Say this phrase, or offer that treat, and this particular dog is likely to act in a certain way.
But our inclinations about what it’s actually like to be a dog are all inventions, reverse-engineered to give us a clue about what they might do next.
“If I were you,” is a pretty useless sentence, particularly for dogs. You’re not them, and you can’t imagine what it’s like.
The same is true for computers and for AI. We make up a story about what the computer wants, expects or thinks. But it’s simply a way to explain our guesses about behavior, not actually a statement about what it’s like to be that device or program.
You’ve probably already guessed (there I am, imagining what it’s like to be you) that the same is true for other humans. We only know for sure what it’s like to be ourselves. Everything else is speculation.
Empathy is essential, but it’s also difficult.
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