AI is Human
When we talk about AI, we think about machines and algorithms. The LLMs made it especially poignant, we think that somehow our minds got slurped by the machines, our dreams and fears, our thoughts and skills. The robots scoured the internet for all human knowledge and absorbed it. We talk about AI taking our jobs, posing danger.
But AI is simply a set of programs and data that we wrote. And we have to maintain it every day. There's a notion of bit rot — when programmer stops tending to their code, it rots, it stops working. That's because computers themselves are evolving — teams of other humans are upgrading and maintaining them.
So AI is just a collection of tools and knowledge representing the humans who built it. When you look at AI, you see the fruits of labor of many engineers, designers, data scientists, product managers, VCs, writers, philosophers. You interact with fantastic people — the young dreamers from Silicon Valley, from France, from Bangalore, who might be digital nomads coding from Bali, or family men and women commuting in their Sienas along the 101. They wrote this code in between answering emails, getting coffee, paying bills, setting up dates or picking up kids. They read the blogs, learn the tools, and dream. And they have built it, and it works, and now you play with it.