I just read Sam’s latest observations post. It’s been impressive watching Moore’s Law continue to play out in AI training, swiftly overcoming previously ‘impossible’ hurdles. It’s an exciting time!
I’m equally struck and similarly uncertain about this future Sam depicts, largely because he’s right.
The world will not change all at once; it never does. Life will go on mostly the same in the short run, and people in 2025 will mostly spend their time in the same way they did in 2024. We will still fall in love, create families, get in fights online, hike in nature, etc.
But the future will be coming at us in a way that is impossible to ignore, and the long-term changes to our society and economy will be huge. We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today.
I’m feel somewhat embedded in the space, working in tech and keeping a close pulse. I’ve started to see AI tooling take over much of my personal needs - specs, emails, code, coaching is largely a back and forth between myself and Claude, with it’s working memory of our conversation and my state increasing over time (making it even more productive).
And over time, it’s going to just get better. Most of the software engineering jobs today are rote - they follow the same processes that were defined when SaaS was just becoming commonplace - simple tickets to fix a small, well-scoped bug, or adding a feature. It’s mundane but necessary. Much of the work out there today is mundane. As tedious as it goes, much of ‘life’ is just finding small joy out of the mundane that most any individual must undergo - spending time working on problems with children, going to the grocery store each week, working on a creative craft and hobby.
Over time, much of this mundaneness can theoretically be eliminated. We can quickly deploy an agent to come up with healthy, fun food options for the week, and get them delivered the next day. I can quickly use an AI tutor to work on the math problem with my child, with better instruction and challenge than I’d be able to. I can put out a production-grade indie-pop song with just a few prompts rather than toiling away in Ableton. There’s is a beauty in this mundane, and a healthy friction in working these, improving, iterating. It’s part of how we find purpose and fulfillment.
It seems that the foundations of traditional life and work are quickly getting scrapped to make way for the creative work and greenfield opportunities that may emerge on top. But it forces the question - how does this space evolve? How will this effect our minds and bodies with those somewhat ‘grounding’ forces no longer necessary?
I read a quote a bit ago mentioning that this new AI wave is just another spike in the constant evolution in tech. E.g., 20 years ago, we would have looked at modern affordances and new developments as a unimaginable future. But I do think this next wave of AI will be different. It will have the capacity to take on tasks we would normally spend days on (planning, thinking, working). And while I’m excited I’ll be able to see out much of this development through my career, there is some worry in the fact that life will likely have to be charted a bit differently, thought out with a different lens. And with that having not really haven been proven out (how to go about the AGI world in a sustainable way), there’s much more uncertainty in the decisions made.