Fwd: Thoughts

We’re living in the middle of a transition— not just a technological one, but a cognitive one.

You can see it in how different generations use AI.

Older folks approach it like a powerful new version of Google. Linear questions, transactional intent, and a strong focused trust. People in their 50s and up were raised with the idea that technology was external. A tool. A thing you go to. You ask, it answers—supposedly factually and neutrally just like they were taught about broadcast media and books.

Millennials (my cohort) were raised with the internet’s birth and chaos. We saw tech move from external to companion—from desktops to smartphones, from web browsers to apps we wake up to. And we carry a deep awareness of how fallible, biased, and sometimes unhinged these systems can be. Which is probably why we use AI as a reflection tool more than a truth engine. To bounce ideas, to draft, to argue with. Not to trust blindly.

But younger users—Gen Z and younger—use AI differently. They don’t just interact with it. They incorporate and lean on it as a therapist or perhaps even greater power. It’s the first stop for schoolwork. The background engine for writing, coding, even thinking. An operating system through their everyday as an invisible guide for their next action and thoughts. It’s not an assistant. It’s an extension. Not a source among many, but the source. The mental model has shifted from “use the tool” to “follow the tool.”

That’s not just interesting. It’s predictive.

Because when you map it out, it mirrors how we’ve approached every leap in computing:

Era	Relationship to Tech
Pre-internet	External appliance
Smartphone age	Digital companion
AI-native generation	Trusted guidance

It’s not far from cyberpunk anymore. You don’t need to embed chips in the brain. If people are already thinking via technology, if it’s already shaping what we believe and how we decide, then the interface is already part of the mind.

And that raises the question of agency.

The youngest trust it the most—because they never saw it built, never debugged its hallucinations, never read the footnotes of its failures. They don’t treat it like a flawed tool, but like a friend. Or more precisely: a wise, endlessly knowledgeable, and nonjudgmental mentor. A mirror that knows more than they do, but never makes them feel small. When the AI black box nods back confidently, it lands not just as affirmation—but as guidance. Parental.

And here’s the thing: most of the time, it is right—especially when you have no idea what to do. AI draws from the aggregate of human knowledge. Which means its suggestions reflect the best average move. Not perfect, not innovative—just what has statistically worked. And when you’re new to a space, that’s exactly what you need. Average is better than nothing. Better than guessing. Better than flailing. And case comes to worst, you just did what most people did before you. ‘No one gets fired for choosing Intel’ goes the saying.

But there’s a cost. Because if average is always safer and faster, fewer people will risk starting from zero. The AI becomes not just a tutor—but a funnel. One that penalizes exploration by rewarding conformity. A generation raised on performance and optimization anxiety won’t just see AI as a helpful guide. They’ll see it as the only rational way forward because competition and resources demand it. Just look at how the white collar job space is now, where you either adapt to AI to improve your productivity or lose to the people who do. And slowly, the muscle to wander, to be wrong, to try something new without precedent—atrophies.

This future arrives through convenience. Through natural game theory in our day-to-day lives in competition with each other. Through the lazier path being the more reliable one.

We don’t have the worry about the operating system going into our head via chips or implants. We’re moving our head to the operating system.

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t really that impressed by chatGPT in the beginning. When the first open beta came out, I played with it for a few queries and found it a bit underwhelming. So while my colleagues and friends seemed to run around with their hair on fire in pure doomerism, I kind of… just enjoyed the show. That’s changed a bit. Not because of how the model is beating out law students taking the LSATs, but because there’s finally been some interesting use-cases coming out of it: stories of people using it to properly diagnose their pet’s sickness when their vet couldn’t, people using it for standard copy & paste legal contracts, and even authors using it to spellcheck and tone-check their articles. I’ll add my use-case: I asked it for a song and artists recommendation by giving it 5 artists I like, and it gave better results than Spotify. Low bar I’m sure. But I pay for Spotify, and it does better than it.

The thing that really popped out at me was the fact of how this usefulness came to be. And its that, it came out via the availability of the AI to the mass public. We’ve always thought about how AI could be used to scale XYZ, but we never really thought about how people could be used to scale AI. And that’s an interesting thought because if there is an answer to that: and if AI really is the economic future that may displace most of our current economic labors, then anyway that humans can scale AI is the remaining way that humans will be able to deliver unique economic value. In other words, its the only way for those of us paranoid about being replaced or made redundant in tomorrow’s economy to still have a job or a reason for our silicon overlords to not reduce us to inefficient Matrix batteries.

So then. What are those things, how can we scale AI?

Continue reading “Inhuman AI lets us scale what is Human” →

In a twist of fate, it looks like blue collar and white collar are going to switch places. For the past decade or so, many people have cheekily told the blue collar to #LearnToCode. Manufacturing is gone, they said. Manual labor is over, they said. If you want to be well paid, go where the jobs are, they said.

But what if the jobs are… everywhere? Ben Thompson’s central tenet on Aggregation Theory is that as distribution costs go to zero, the product that owns the customer relationship matters more than anything else. Pre-existing business models that relied on geographical or distribution as a barrier to entry without any other differentiation outside of “I’m your only choice” will die and go away. We see this via online news sources and local newspapers. Online retailers versus physical retail (whose decrease the pandemic has only accelerated). And of course there’s Netflix versus the cable bundle.

We can take this same model and apply it to the job market.

Employees/Labor are the cable bundles. Though there’s a lot of us, ultimately supply was constrained by geographical and legal constraints. Many would love to work for Google for example, but not everyone is willing to move to Mountain View. And even if they were, the legal system might still not issue them a visa to do so. Those were the barriers.

Continue reading “Blue Collar, White Collar: Freaky Friday and FAANG Domination” →

And no, it’s not just because it’s mostly only people who work with the internet that can work at home.

At the risk of shouting the same things that everyone else is, there’s been some very obvious trends that this extended remote work has promoted. A quick list just to make sure we’re on somewhat similar pages:

1. Tech companies getting a very real measure of remote employee efficiency (and assuming its the same, better, or even slightly worse)
   • Decrease demand in commercial real estate and office space
   • Increased investment in their non-local workforce
     • Increased diversity due to wider area recruitment
     • Increased competition and talent due to larger labor pool
     • Decreased costs by leaving urban centers
2. People realizing the feeling of freedom and comfort of being in their own private space for the majority of the day while still being able to work and earn a living… AND be close to the ones they love
   • Re-shifting the priority between work and personal life
   • Paradoxically, a blurring of work hours. Increased length of on-call times but decreased intensity. Instead of 8 hours of high octane focus, it may be 24 hours of varying attention
3. A further hit to the ecosystem that revolved around corporate complexes (restaurants, shops, and other stores built near corporate offices to serve the workers)

Those feel like pretty standard guesses that we can make at this point. Outside of slight derivatives of those assumptions, the other forays made are often about habit and consumer spending behavior. Which are valid, but another discussion.

Instead what I think is more interesting and less covered is supply part:

The First: Corporate Internal Innovation

If we take the step of #2 further and realize what it means, it paints a potentially grim picture for companies. Not about productivity no, I’m an optimist and believe that people will continue to pull their weight and contribute. Instead, a lot of value that companies capture from their workforce is in the creative drive and interactions between their employees– value that is neither expected nor properly compensated for (and therefore I argue, not their responsibility), but gleefully consumed by the company whenever possible.

With no coffee-meets, water-cooler talks, or just the continuous subconscious humdrum that accompanies physically seeing or hearing someone outside of your world, I am positive that company innovation will be down. Discussions will be down. Spontaneity will be down. Zoom calls are a very explicit and almost aggressive act, proper ones require an agenda, act as a sharp and uncomfortable introduction of formality and work into one’s home, while also shouting for cold efficiency. After all, dead air with a friend is awkward enough– dead air with a co-worker or worse, a manager, is bone-chilling.

For companies who realize this and value it, there might need to be forced physical gatherings. Perhaps employee-only conferences or some form of extended retreats. Unfortunately, until immersive VR, this will only be possible via large company purse strings.

The Second: Company Direction and Investment Culture

If the above ends up being correct about a drastic decrease in company innovation due to people simply being more distant from each other and the company, then it’s very likely that we’ll see a huge drop-off in the crazy and wonderful integrative solutions that arise from bottom-up creation.

Instead, because the responsibility of the brunt of employees is not that– and because the remoteness of work has put in that distinct border between their responsibilities and zone with regards to work and private life, it’s very possible that companies will become more top-down than ever. Only those whose responsibility is in creativity and creation will continue to do so, but their works are often insular and one-directional due to the weights of professional training and unconscious bias.

Thing is, many companies rely on those sort of creations to remain relevant and discover new evolutions. Even before, successful creativity and outside thinking was hard to find. That’s why instead of fostering and spinning off more and more blockbuster products, we see that the trend more often than not for industry titans is M&A.

So outside of slowing down intra-company innovation, what impacts does that have? I argue a lot:

• Reduced company innovation means reduced competitiveness, I expect a slowing of feature in the truly new and adventurous
• Lack of new alternative ideas by definition means companies are less likely to expand outside of their current market. Not just slowing their growth but also putting a cap on their potential

And that ties into investing. Our current culture is smitten with VC-funded entrepreneurship. The dream is one original idea, funded with millions, earning billions. Part of that though relies on that one idea continuing to grow and then give birth to more (Amazon into AWS, anyone?). But if growth is stunted (raising the ROI time horizon) and idea mitosis is decreased (returns are lowered), then that era might be coming to an end. Whether this means less money goes into VCs, they become stingier in choosing what to invest in, or the dynamic just shifts as a whole– it’ll be something interesting to keep an eye on.

Companies paying for growth via acquisitions are the same. After all, what are M&As but companies acting as a VC but in a more complete and intimate investment?

The Third: Entrepreneurship

Far be it from me to end it on a negative note, I generally still think this change can be positive. And that’s solely because of what these impacts mean for entrepreneurship. Assuming that consumer spending and the economy doesn’t drive everyone into austerity, a larger talent pool, cheaper business operations run-rate (cheaper talent + no rent), and less VC money might mean that we begin to replicate real world traditional entrepreneurship into the internet world: smaller market sizes, slimmer margins, and more private ownership.

And as technology continues to open up and make things like development much easier, this means a much more varied and competitive landscape. Perhaps we’ll see the internet version of mom & pop stores begin to sprout and flourish. We already see a lot of this in terms of where the physical world bleeds into the digital (dark kitchens, private digital retailers, or even just the online site of a family-owned service), but now a full transition can be made.

A worry however is that these digital “mom & pop” stores will not be created nor owned by the same traditional mom & pop ones we talk about in the news. It’s more likely that those will be the ones who’ll continue to be driven out of business due to digitalization, but are unable to switch and learn to adapt to the new age.

There’s not much we can do in terms of the technological aspect, as we can’t simply expect them to learn coding. Even before that would have to be the understanding and urgency in realizing that the melding between physical and digital economies come in phases, and we’re maybe only just now entering the next one.

After more than a decade of the idolization of negative-run rate companies with billions in investment IPO’ing or permanent VC-funded companies however, this return to traditional business models is a breath of fresh air. It’ll require new businesses to quickly get in the black, be self-sustainable, and generally more resilient to even situations like the pandemic-stricken one we find ourselves in now.