Updates on 2023/8/9

An excerpt from an internal doc on AI:

My belief is that, once the dust settles, humans are still working — still creating, still wanting, still debating. But that our time and energy will take us farther with the new tools and collaborators we'll have created along the way. We hope these tools will help our best work become even better, while letting us delegate away the minutiae of the meta-work that takes us away from it.

I've spent a lot of time over the years desperately trying to think of a "thing" to change the world. I now know why the search was fruitless — things don't change the world. People change the world by using things. The focus must be on the "using", not the "thing". Now that I'm looking through the right end of the binoculars, I can see a lot more clearly, and there are projects and possibilities that genuinely interest me deeply.

— Bret Victor

This is the humanist view of AI that I think should fuel our work. This is what we should try to see, where we should aim, when we build with AI, as extensions of our human agency rather than amplifiers of the mechanics of our labor.

On this, I loved what Maya added:

...the AI should gesture, not instruct, us. "Gesturing" preserves our agency, "instructing" infringes upon it.

I want to build interfaces that lets the AI gesture us into a better future without infringing upon our agency.