The board needs to see that we are doing “something” and so management consultants have done a lot of paddling aggressively. Everyone is making money of artificial intelligence right? Well, wrong.
My belief is that this is a result of not having adequate developer tools at the enterprise level so no processes are repeatable or simple yet. Not for lack of trying in a frenzy of weird media panics around whether chat bots are gods or just malign spirits. Which like lol.
This isn’t something that gets solved overnight. Value accrues in strange ways to very particular forms of automation. Whether that gets bought up in bidding wars over core technologies over time or in simple breakout solutions isn’t actually as predictable as you’d imagine it. It’s very much about people who build things that other people want in reasonably reliable ways.
But right now a lot of software is being built in silly and not terribly repeatable ways. It reminds me a little bit of having been at a specialty retailer trying to figure out ecommerce and making a bunch of mistakes. Eventually the market solves it and then it demands a return on investment.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of my information dumps, you know me to be a science fiction reader. It’s one of my true passions and most consistent hobbies.
I am very well read in the space through this love and it has proven to be an enormous advantage for a career in technology startups. It’s very rare to meet a builder that hasn’t in some way come to that love through imagining the future as it could be.
While I love classics from Asimov to Heinlein and I read everything from space opera to hard tech, my first true passion for genre fiction was cyperpunk. I saw a networked world of computation and I fell in love.
So it is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of one of the giants of science fiction, cyberspace progenitor, father of the tech singularity and mathematician Vernor Vinge.
His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration.
It’s through the vision of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson that I saw what computing could do to help us build.
Cyperpunk wrote many imaginative paths for artificial intelligence. Gibson’s Neuromancer and gave us early crypto culture. Neal Stephenson showed us a virtual world atop our current one in Snowcrash. The metaverse emerges.
I’ve lived my entire adult life online after an entirely analog childhood. I am straddling that small gap of in-between human. I helped build some small parts of the network of the internet. I am a citizen of the network state. I am all these things because of Vernor Vinge.
Humanity shines with tools and we had found in math a way to give an explanation of the workings the world. That our meager intelligences learned to compute and then to build computing machines astounds me.That we continue to build something more with those insights astounds me further. The acceleration of that started long before me.
Networking our computation has taken us so far and so fast. It reflects the best and worst of us. Vernor explored “what if“ futures that went far behind our contained cyberspace. We wouldn’t have modern singularity thought about what could happen if artificial intelligence really will emerge amongst us without Vinge’s work. The Zones of Thought series is a mind bender.
Vernor is as close as nerds have to a prophet. Here we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence dominate our human great power debates from culture to business to government. Everyone who makes things has an opportunity here to own building this.
I know that in whatever moment we are about greet (singularity or not) that I remember that we humans build technology from the imagination of Vernor Vinge.
No matter how alien the future may seem, we humans have build it first. Don’t you want to be a part of that?
If you are an autist of any stripe still attempting to operate in the field I will broadcast to you. You may need to make a pilgrims and it will just be an information dump but I’ll do my best. You have to put it together yourself but the old web is not fully broken.
The maze of information is winding and the roll ups and bureaucracy winds on and off the Silk Road. Literal and metaphorical. I don’t even know how many of you bought drugs on the old internets and how many of you bought Uranium. I have nothing but Netflix and communist literature. Lots of people have opinions on drugs and whores. I am not one of them truth be told except I’m of the firm opinion whores shouldn’t side with empire but I’m not in Burke’s Peerage so what do I know.
Maybe there is a world where Bridgerton actually happened and some autistic king and some colonial wife really do live in harmony. I don’t know I’m a William Gibson fan. Pour one out for information wants to be free homies. The nerds shouldn’t have been weaponized and whatever capitalism is doing should probably check in with reality.
How to tell what a company does
You are caught in someone’s opinion. None of us know who is influencing us except the sort of dorks who map carefully and most of the nerds have day jobs. The only ones who see it are just doing their best to allocate the attention and resources. Lots of people are doing chaos magic. Maybe stop? Or summon better demons.
Any number of nerds are caught in elaborate webs of inferences. A lot of them are left wingers. Precious view are genuine communists. But also some sincere ones are out there. Most are happy to be in the recursive loop of reality in which we maintain our lives. Some of us are banging on the cage.
A lot of emotional energy has been directed at the “problem” of “women in technology” in the last decade or two. Stupid campaigns get run with degrees of condescension in which it’s insinuated the only way women could see the value in crypto is if we make a perfume. It’s the rankest form of sexism and extremely effective. And I’ve proudly worked in cosmetics. Chemistry is cool.
So today on International Women’s Day I’d like to remind myself that I’ve l been “in tech” since the moment I fell in love with a personal computer as a young teen. I’m on that edge of elder millennial that did things in the real world as children but had access to the virtual early.
Plenty of men mistakenly assume that because I worked in fashion, beauty and ecommerce. I was early before the ease of hosted Shopify accounts or even Heroku instances for an app. It was a lot more roll your own.
And yet some think my experience doesn’t count. Despite it being a clearly sign of capital markets having underpricing occasionally. Ifs a good thing. You go where market rewards you and you learn to learn skills along the way.
I think so much less about my gender now. Almost resent ever having been talked into it. You do it right then you, like an anyone else in the market, can benefit when someone misallocates.
If you are lucky enough to steward your own capital, then get to be part of the investor bases to build the next generation. I do that now. I am still a woman.
I’m proud to use the resources I have to invest in what I believe in based on my experiences and the thesis I invest under. Not as some smoothed over marketing narrative with a gender hook. No I price like an actor you can do business with. I am willing to show my revealed preference.
I learned in previous eras so I may serve the generation that is coming up. And I’m happy to invest in the ares I believe in most. I am happy as a woman to invest in men as I am in women.
The focus I see in founders I have invested in across energy, artificial intelligence and crypto are ones I believe in. I believe in them as people. I believe in them as founders. I believe in them as men.
I am lucky to be seen as an individual with capital and insights that can help them carry a better future forward. I hope all founders are seen as individuals.
Technology innovation has been the driver of improved human life. Material prosperity is good for women. It’s good for men. So I’ll celebrate doing stuff for the boys on international women’s day.
Alex Miller visiting with me at one of our favorite portfolio company Valar Atomics. I believe in Isiah and his team.
William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory is probably familiar to you but I’ll cite it for my own edification.
The Strauss–Howe generational theory, devised by William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a theorized recurring generationcycle in American history and Western history. According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes). Each generational persona unleashes a new era (called a turning) lasting around 20–25 years, in which a new social, political, and economic climate (mood) exists.
I go in for this “generational horoscope” theory. But I go in for lots of other “deterministic and unfalsifiable” things too so weight that in your assessment. I’m a woman who has a deep respect for woo even though I do generally consider myself a rationalist. And like all rationalists I’m hypocritically predisposed to biasing own qualia. Nevertheless I believe the hard laws are physics not culture.
So it was with interest that I was this theory of elder millenials cross my feed. The oldest of the last generation to live without the internet may prove a further data point for The Fourth Turning fans.
My guess is that the most interesting political figures of the next 20 years will come from this cohort— 1981-1987. -not digitally native, but digitally fluent. -came of age during or just after September 11th. -Started adulthood just before or during the Great Recession. -the final bridge to the 20th century, but young enough to be grounded in the 21st.Katherine Boyle of a16z on Twitter
American dynamism is a patriotic posture of older Silicon Valley culture. And this group of proudly rationalist and engineering minded types is extremely frustrated with being made the enemy by the government. Obama era technocracy represented what looks like a detente between the Boomers and the millennials.
If we are in the middle of a generational changeover between Boomers and millennials it would seem as if the elder children might inherent. But you don’t see a lot of folks who remember a world before the internet. I think there is something in this narrative that will prove important as the moods shift.
I’m upset. I feel it in my body. Soma apparently means “body” in Latin, somatic is “of the body” so to have a response in your body is a somatic response. I’m having a somatic response.
I’ve been surprised at the emotional campaigns that have been waged against technology in the general, and artificial intelligence in the specific, as of late. But I am starting to feel the emotional weight of the collective fear and emotion in my own body. Futureshock is here and the fear mongers are here to tell you and I that we should be afraid.
The o-ed was written by David Evan Harris who is a chancellor’s public scholar at UC Berkeley. He used to work a Meta on ethical AI. Now this not the opinion of IEEE which is calls itself “the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.”
You’d think that sort of mission would be a little more on board with new technologies. But maybe David is just an extreme voice. Op-Ed’s are meant to represent a variety of opinions after all.
But how should I feel about the benefits of technology when it’s presented to me like this? They used a skull to really get across the visceral fear. No friendly face to make a concession to our silly human anthropomorphic desires. Let’s scare the stupid hairless apes.
Don’t worry the government and regulations will save us from this psychedelic skull
I have an inherent skepticism when someone wants to sell me on the dangers of regular people having access to something new and potentially transformative. Why must we always default to the precautionary principle? Why is fear always our default?
I don’t want to let this sort of thing get to me. But I can see the narrative campaign being waged against artificial intelligence and the sheer volume and tenor of coverage leads me to believe that everyone is aware of its potential.
Claiming artificial intelligence is only for the knowledgeable few chosen by committee of expert sounds so sensible. But I think my body knows better. I should be upset by this.
I am feeling relaxed. This feeling has eluded me for nearly a week as the race to Christmas holidays left me mostly feeling sick and in pain.
I was getting tension headaches from the long hours and stress of the last two months of work. In an attempt to improve my muscular skeletal compensatory issues, I triggered a “this gets worse before it gets better” healing crisis. While my C1 and C2 upper spine feels much better, every other connected system was also contorted to accommodate the problem. It’s a bit of an adjustment.
But I slept a solid ten hours last night and I managed to get several naps in the past few days. By the time I made it to my first working session today after Christmas, I was ready to enjoy my work again. There is no finer pleasure to be found in startup life than a team you enjoy working with.
I am lucky that I do what I love. It doesn’t feel much like work to help founders you admire take action. The limber approach of answering to your best judgement is a joy. A startup dynamic that’s productive can feel as if you are intaking information and updating your prior working models at a rapid clip. And if you are lucky see results from your actions. It’s invigorating
I hope I feel a bit better and more rested as the week rolls on as I’d like to do a 2023 roundup but my priorities remain the work and my health so what gets done will be ordered as such. I hope everyone has work that engages them thusly.
I make a living pricing risk. I do that through investment but also a few highly specialized skills I deploy on behalf of founders of startups.
The shortest articulation is that I am very good at spotting subcultures and helping them come into the mainstream and find a market that will pay them.
Not all markets are liquid and lots of arbitrage happens between types of capital. Sometimes a culture doesn’t survive contact with the mainstream. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing if the culture can’t self police.
There have been three core subcultures that make up my world and have been core to the history of the American west. Hippies, hackers and hipsters. I contain bits of each. I made an early career in prestige industries like media, fashion, and cosmetics (hipster) but I was born into a Silicon Valley family (hackers) and raised by a counterculture mother (hippies).
I’ve got that particular syncretic experience that so typifies “Grey Tribe” as our values have often been at odds with institutional power but we are perfectly fine with wider coordination mechanisms being chosen at different levels of abstraction. This is fancy speak for we like markets but don’t seek them for every problem as trust is a personal choice.
I am feeling as if the openness of my tribes is under attack because signaling mechanisms are breaking down. Seeing bad behavior is always upsetting. Lots of groups are seeing enemies on all sides and sociopaths seeking power. It’s a bit depressing. All of the nodes of our network need to do a better job at signaling that some risks are unacceptable. You need to maintain openness but not so open your capacity to judge risk is affected.
I’ve been exploring historical American attempts at regulation of computing as part of my #FreedomToCompute effort. We have an excellent example from the Clinton era which are colloquially called the Encryption Wars.
This campaign might be instructive as we decide what kind of regulatory climate might best foster machine learning and artificial intelligence innovation globally as well as what might to the best defense protections for individuals and groups who wish to work productively with approaches like inference databases and large language models.
That’s why the key takeaway from the conflict is that weakening or undermining encryption is bad for the U.S. economy, Internet security, and civil liberties—and we’d be far better off if we remembered why the Crypto Wars turned out they way they did, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past
This piece included a number of negative consequences from reducing encryption in exported products which eventually undermined our own national security interests in protecting citizen’s own privacy. A lesson we continued to learn the hard way in the middle aughts Patriot Act “war on terror” era.
It’s worth skimming a review of the era from ChatGPT.
Silicon Valley played a crucial role in lobbying for encryption during the late 1990s. Tech companies and privacy advocates, realizing the importance of secure communication, actively opposed government attempts to restrict encryption. They argued that strong encryption was essential for protecting user privacy, fostering e-commerce, and ensuring the security of digital communications.
In response to this pressure, the Clinton administration began to reevaluate its stance on encryption. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Executive Order 13026, which relaxed export restrictions on encryption products. This marked a shift towards recognizing the importance of strong encryption for both national security and the technology industry.
As part the part of Twitter called TPOT comes into its own power the topic of resource allocation and how to route projects to sources of capital game up with Brooke Bowman of VibeCamp. It is a key question for Network State like entities that will need to navigate social ties.
I want to share how I do it as I’ve rooted some amount of capital across very different communities. I do it with some sets of intuitions I’ve gained from existing in a very powerful network of interests that are “The Silicon Diaspora” which is a syncretic coalition.
Much of it comes down to very specific context of what others are looking for in terms of outcomes. Investors with a specific thesis are much easier to work with for this reason. I try to express mine clearly at chaotic.capital and express myself actively through revealed preferences. I assume nothing is personal & everyone is working with some amount of emotional reactivity as it’s a human business.
A lot of it comes down to knowing who is a node in your network that can redirect it to someone who believes their resources can see a good return on their goals that are varying levels of abstract and personal. Skills and passions vary and this is good. It’s a mix of social capital, actual capital, and attention and it’s a giant game of inference
Some folks very good nodes and quite open to a range of different types of projects. Sometimes it’s just as simple as asking if they know someone who knows someone. I see a lot that isn’t in my own thesis but it’s in my own interest to pass it to others for whom it might be. The ecosystem approach has maximum strength when it’s played as a multi-agent pro-social game.
Also you almost never know someone’s full history so taking any reaction super personally is something I find to be too much for my own emotions. And I know a lot of history so if I can’t do it I try to make the presumption others can’t either. Be kind but clear.
Showing you understand their context, their fears and their reputations concerns helps you. An act we denigrate in popular culture actually helps you to deepen the relationships as each signifier breaks down space between two people and builds trust. So don’t knock gossip. It has evolutionary, societal and individual benefit. Just remember the ultimate outcome is about bringing people closer.
I believe we are in an era where individuals can exercise significantly more agency because of the high leverage nature of the tools available to us. We owe much of this to information access and that is a wide coalition of people who are exercising basic freedoms to self determine because of this march of technology.
It’s my belief that freedom to compute is freedom of speech and these digital communities represent what I hope is more effective self governance through decentralization. We must build up the social trust amongst each other by showing we value each other’s interests. I believe this to be the right thing to do for each other. It’s the human thing too.
