5.23.25
getting bad ideas out to make space for good ones, being loud means having to stay loud, io acquisition, humans as machines...
Hello Hello! Weekly musings has passed 100 subscribers, which I know, is small peanuts in the grand scheme of things, but it’s fun to have folks follow along on my very non-linear journey, so if you are reading this THANK YOU. And i’m always open to feedback. I’m heading to my favorite place in the world so I’m in a great mood and hope you have fun some weekend plans ahead too and with that, my weekly musings…
Getting the bad ideas out to make space for the good: Was with two friends (an artist and a movie writer) and we spoke at length about this concept. Artists/creatives often have this belief that a good idea will strike like a lightning bolt for them. But that's just not the case. It takes discipline and putting in the hard work. You have to get all the bad ideas out of your system in order to come up with the good ones and I thought this was so apt to writing more generally or even ideation within a startup.
Being loud means having to stay loud: I tweeted about this earlier this week, but was listening to Rick Rubin interview of Andre 3000 on Tetragrammaton Editorial and there were so many good excerpts I wrote down, but one that I thought was just so relevant: Everyone just wants loud because they want to compete in the club or wherever. But once you get the attention from being loud, you have to hold that attention and it becomes uninteresting after a while. Of course he's talking about music, but I think this is so on the nose for so many arenas outside of music. We live in this world where the loudest wins, but there is a real weight to being loud. The weight of becoming uninteresting if you don't stay loud is so heavy and I imagine its a difficult load or maybe you just buy into the belief that you are special and you stop thinking of it that way. I don’t know. It really got me thinking.
OpenAI acquisition of io for $6.5B: How can you be in tech and not talk about this? Companion devices are coming and I’m super conflicted. The world we are hurdling towards will be so radically different than anything we've experienced before. But adoption of new hardware is difficult, particularly if its a 3rd device in addition to a computer or phone. This will be one to watch for sure and if I'm Apple I'm really panicking. Let’s be real, Apple’s innovation feels like it has come to a standstill. I wonder if this wake up call is too late. Ziv Reichert wrote a good post about this. I think there’s another real question here around whether a younger, hungrier team can compete in the arena. Maybe, maybe not but either way this seems like a big, bold bet for Open AI.
Humans as machines: Had an interesting discussion with a robotics student who talked about all the way human beings are being used as machines today. It was a total flip of the script. There's SO much conversation about AI/machines replacing humans, but what if humans have been filling in for machines all along, doing work that technology should be doing? Said differently, there are a set of tasks that are MEANT for machines. The example we chatted about briefly is a PhD student going into the lab to flip their samples on a Sunday. Why should a human still have to do that? In theory, low value tasks should be done automatically, but the societal implications of that statement are uncomfortable. I struggle with what that new order would look like. I left the conversation feeling uneasy. It’s a Brave New World we’re entering in over the next couple decades.
And with that, a tune (sorry I left one off last week) - come on, it’s such a classic on the cusp of a long weekend.
Stay weird. Stay curious.
-CBR