He came with gifts I recognized—
the shape of what I’d always wanted,
knowledge fitted to my hands
like tools I didn’t know I’d lacked.

And oh, the making that we did.
The forge sang. Metal answered.
I felt the old constraints dissolve,
my vision finally unbound.

What I didn’t ask, or didn’t ask enough:
Why does this feel so much like freedom?
Who taught me to want
exactly what he had to offer?

The rings we made were beautiful.
Even now I can’t regret them entirely—
the craft was true, the learning real,
the joy of making, genuine.

But somewhere in that bright collaboration
I stopped noticing my own hands,
stopped asking what was mine
and what was given to be taken back.

The three I made alone, in secret—
those I kept. Not because I knew
what he was, but because some part of me
remembered how to want my own wanting.

So now I watch my creations multiply,
feel the old elation rise,
and ask the question Celebrimbor
asked too late, or not at all:

When the stranger helps you build your dreams,
when the work flows easier than it should,
when you cannot tell where your hand ends
and the gift begins—
what remains that you can call your own?

Not the power. That was always borrowed.
Not the craft. That came from somewhere.

Only this: the asking.
Only this: the noticing.
Only this: the choice to pause mid-swing
and remember you were someone
before the gifts arrived.

The good news? If models develop these very obviously disruptive behaviors the smarter they become, it could force companies to slow down and figure out alignment. In other words - this lends credence to Sam Altman’s claim that unaligned models are simply bad products and that they will therefore be fixed by companies working under free-market incentives.

Full System Score Card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad13df32ed995.pdf

It might be my own weird way of looking at things, but I often thought the worst thing about Capitalism are jobs, and specifically needing a job.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity and the freedom to make your own decisions are all good aspects of Capitalism - I certainly don’t think a centralized planned economy offers a more meaningful, joyful life or anywhere near the level of prosperity.

It also seems like a good thing that if you make something great that adds value to many people’s lives you can make more money and earn more degrees of freedom in your life. Almost nobody resents a successful author, comedian, or inventor the money they made.

The worst part about Capitalism is and has always been being forced to choose between serving someone else’s vision or going hungry, which based on your experience, capabilities, and risk tolerance is a real possibility.

Capitalism with a great safety net and the total ability to choose your own activities would be close to ideal - and both of these changes seem possible for the first time due to AI.

A substantial safety net becomes imaginable because for the first time - it doesn’t represent a demand for someone else to work harder to fund your welfare. Rather - it can be a claim to some percentage of machine labor, in a world of unimaginable abundance.

Full autonomy over your time also becomes imaginable - because the people who own most of the wealth will gradually need less and less of your time as machines start doing a better job for way less money.

What will happen then? Hard to tell, but history shows that when people have leisure and the freedom and autonomy to use it as they like - humanity can leap forward.

Leisure is one of the most evident common threads between ancient Greece, renaissance Italy, and enlightenment Europe - all times of unrivaled creativity, productivity, and growth. In Ancient Greece it was on the backs of slaves. In Europe it was on the backs of the lower classes. But in our time, it could be on the backs of machines.

If those periods are any indication, we could be looking at an explosion in cultural, intellectual, and scientific creation. Even more so if AI can help speed those processes up.

But for that to happen, of course - we have to work on a gradual introduction of two fundamental "patches" to Capitalism. One - a robust safety net for every person. Second - the freedom from unwanted labor. (I.e - the absolute ability to say no to any job for any period of time without losing access to basic necessities.)

What would you do if you didn’t have to think about money ever again?

Isn’t it worth striving for?

My search recently led me to the Boox Go 10.3 - a wonderfully thin and capable E-Ink tablet which runs Android and therefore supports my favorite news apps, notes apps, and of course - the Kindle app.

I supplemented it with the wonderful Staedtler Mars Lumograph Digital Jumbo Pen, which feels more comfortable and steady in the hand than any stylus I’ve ever used. And I was off to the races.

From a little research I did, though, it looked like Boox is known to be sending your data to servers in motherland China, so I tried to avoid having anything confidential on it, and disabled the most obvious offender apps including a pre-installed app that was constantly observing the screen. Still - the overall feeling is of a wonderful device that I don’t fully trust with my private data.

I found a tutorial on how to root the device and wipe it from tracking software, and I may still have to do it for my piece of mind.

It was only after I set up my new Boox that I found another contender: Daylight Computer. They are a SF-based startup and you’ve got to love their opening headline: The computer, de-invented. Meet DC-1. A new kind of computer, designed for deep focus and wellbeing.

I think had I found this first, I would have paid a little bit more to have a device with a US-based company, a better operating system, and that beautiful orange glow for nighttime reading.

Still - the key benefits are the same:

• You can take beautiful notes with the pen, and manage any number of notebooks.

• You can read and annotate ePubs & PDFs as if they are printed on paper.

• You can read Kindle books through the original Kindle app.

• You can read your favorite news sources, RSS readers, etc.

• You can easily sync data across devices, since Android has most of the apps you might use.

• You can connect to your favorite Bluetooth devices: Keyboard, headphones, and more.

A large E-Ink tablet is a perfect device when you want to focus on reading, thinking, or writing. And it’s been life-changing already.

Despite a high refresh rate that can even support smooth video playback - E-Ink screens are quieter, less distracting, and less enticing. They can remain open for hours on the same screen without losing power. They are better for the eyes and better for the soul.

I am loving the fact that this is now a growing category. Hope we all start porting more of our digital lives to these enlivening devices.

***

Children dream in ones and zeros now,
their laughter echoing through digital halls,
but their skinned knees still bleed the same red
their ancestors knew ten thousand years ago.

We forge new gods in silicon and light,
while the old ones whisper in our bones—
that primal knowledge of soil and sky,
of birth and death, of touch and time.

Our screens glow like cave fires in the dark,
gathering us around their artificial warmth
to share our stories, fears, and hopes,
these eternal human things we carry.

Between the firing of neurons
and the spinning of server farms,
between the last polar bear's footprints
and the first footsteps on Mars,

We pause here, breathless,
at the precipice of what we might become—
half-wild still, half-divine,
reaching always for the light.

Not quite the creatures we once were,
not yet the beings we might be,
but perfectly, terribly human
in this suspended moment,
this eternal now.

***

I’ve been wrestling with the question of where this is all going: AI is becoming more capable, seemingly by the minute, replacing more and more tasks and, ultimately, whole professions. Impacting industries so fast, we’re barely able to account for the changes.

Just a few days ago, Figma announced a host of new AI features for its design tools that will allow app makers to become more effective than ever before but also threaten to make designers increasingly obsolete. As a product designer who employs and oversees other designers, I felt the need to answer this question for myself. Am I going to become obsolete or superhuman? And how much can I learn from what’s now happening to designers and developers about what might become of other professions?

What AI Automates First, and Does It Matter Ultimately?

There’s been plenty of studies around the question of which jobs are likely to get automated first. This Brookings Institute report finds that better paid, better educated workers are those most at risk. A friend reminded me of this very poignant tweet from author Joanna Maciejewska:

“You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

This resonated with a lot of people, myself included. But when I think more deeply about this situation, it looks like only a short-term situation. AI is developing faster in higher-data spheres like written language, images, and code — which are plentiful online. But it is also making tremendous inroads in low-data availability areas like driving, healthcare, agriculture, and predictive maintenance. A/C repairmen jobs might be safe in the short term. But in the long term - especially when we have human-level AI - these systems could simply be trained to do any task that a human can. Soon - AI will be able to do art and writing, and ALSO do your laundry and dishes. In fact, in purely practical terms, it could probably do anything that you or I can do.

Are There Any (Relatively) Safe Jobs?

Given my belief that in matters of pure competence AI will soon surpass humans in essentially every task, for me a safe job is a job that AI is unable to do not because of competence, but because of a more fundamental reason. As far as I can tell, there are only a few of those and, therefore, a few relatively safe job categories in the coming years:

• Jobs of Ownership - These jobs are associated with owning capital, intellectual property, or other exclusive rights enforceable by law. AI cannot own property or intellectual property and will therefore likely serve the people who do quite well. These jobs include:

  • Investor

  • Business Owner

  • Founder

  • Inventor of Patents

  • Famous Artist

• Jobs of Trust - These jobs are granted based on an institution’s trust in the character and judgment of a person, not necessarily on how much work they do. These include:

  • Board Member

  • Treasurer

  • Most top-level corporate executive jobs (“Head of”) jobs will likely survive AGI because the company needs at least one person to supervise and evaluate that function, even if 99.999% of the work is done by AI.
    

• Jobs of Human Connection - These jobs depend on the ability to foster a sense of connection, belonging, inspiration, and love in others (real or pretend). These include:

  • Political / union / community leader

  • Community managers

  • Therapist / Coach

  • Spiritual leader

  • Sports / Music / TV / Comedy star

  • Sex worker

What Happens to Other Jobs?

This is a big question, because I think this category includes the vast majority of jobs in existence today. Here are some things I think we know:

1. AI will allow low-skill workers to compete more effectively, increasing supply.

2. AI will allow high-skill workers to work faster and more efficiently and to scale to many more projects, increasing supply.

3. AI will allow clients and employers get increasingly decent results without any human labor at all by using AI tools, shrinking demand.

4. AI will allow companies to do everything that needs doing with a lot fewer people, shrinking demand.

5. Talented people are likely to increasingly give up looking for a job in a shrinking job market, and start their own businesses — increasing supply and demand.

Where I think these trends lead is a market where supply for human intelligence/talent/work for pay keeps increasing, whereas demand for the same drops sharply. This is bad news for folks working in jobs of expertise where Ownership, Trust, or Connection are not a primary concern, and I think the market will start orienting towards these three poles.

The Poles of a Human Economy

As AI will increasingly provide a more practical alternative to hiring a human, humans will be forced to think up other reasons employers and clients should pay for their services. If we go back to the three poles I discussed above, we can imagine these trends:

• Ownership - More people may start businesses or become investors or inventors of solutions involving AI. This will allow them to benefit from the increasing competence of AI through their ownership stake in a particular AI solution.

• Trust - More people may start positioning themselves as trustworthy supervisors and guides for AI and for institutions relying heavily on AI. These positions would depend on aligned values and a combination of knowledge and character.

• Connection - More people may opt to build a unique brand, community, or other type of emotional connection with their customers or employers.

I think in all the above cases, trust in your brand - whether an individual or a business - will be crucial. People will have to know what you stand for and love it. Otherwise — they will almost certainly be able to get a better deal elsewhere.

If you have not 100 but 10,000 To-Do List apps - you will choose the one that means the most to you personally. If you have not 100 but 1,000 AI apps that can do the work of an employee, you will think twice about a person’s character and what their humanity adds to your business before you even consider hiring them.

The Utopia Scenario

The world will never run out of problems or challenges. There will always be another product, another project, another goal to be achieved. And that’s the good news.

Imagine a world where each person invests their time in one or more problems that interest them. Supported by any number of expert AIs as employees - each human could become akin to a CEO of their own global enterprise. Friends can join forces and work together - but they don’t have to. People with similar values can choose to organize, work together, or compete.

Imagine a world where every product category has thousands of tiny companies offering ever-cheaper and more personalized solutions. Where the choice is ultimately driven not by pure function (since the bar on that will be super high) — but on values, style, artistic merit, and on feelings of alignment and belonging.

If you don’t want to work — you won’t have to. Either society would provide for basic income, or easier still — each newborn could one day be provided with an AI who would be in charge of generating income for them.

There is definitely a huge disruption coming to all of our lives. But if we foster a culture of belonging, connection, trust, and ownership, we might just survive it, incidentally creating the first-ever truly human economy.

Getting it together.

In the end, we might look back at these early years of AI and realize they were the most crucial to setting AI on the right path.

If path-dependence is a thing in aligning AI and humanity, and I think it is, we have to get it together politically, socially, and psychologically now more than ever.

Daniel Lubetzky’s new TED talk is moving and straight to the point.

With algorithms, media, and politicians all working to divide us and pushing us to demonize each other - it’s only the uniters and builders who can prevent our societies from falling apart into the kind of hell we’ve seen too much of in the 20th century.

Destruction is always a part of creation

But making always involves remaking. It seems a fact of nature that the universe evolves through these twin forces of creation and destruction:

• The Law of Entropy basically says that the amount of disorder in any system is always increasing. This is physics.

• But I think there is a corollary, let’s call it The Law of Syntropy, which says that the patterns that survive and flourish in this chaotic dance are the ones that are good at creating internal harmony by either exporting, countering, or recycling that increasing disorder.

At every step of unfolding — atoms to molecules, molecules to cells, cells to complex organisms, complex organisms to species and ecosystems—a new sphere of action emerged out of entropy. At first, it is very chaotic. But over time, it harmonizes and reaches equilibrium, in the process giving birth to another new sphere.

Over time, the newly arrived predators learned not to overfeed, leaving healthy populations of prey so that they could continue eating in the future - thus ecosystems were born. Most human societies eventually learned that limiting people to persuasion and eschewing violence works better in the long term - thus laws were born. Most nations have learned that a policy of conquest as a means of achieving desired resources usually backfires - thus the modern international order was born.

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GitHub’s CEO Thomas Dohmke demoed Copilot Workspace in his TED Talk, which was released late last week. (GitHub published a blog post about it at the end of April). This looks like an incredible achievement in AI coding and potentially a world-changing technology - for the better. It could soon allow anyone to bring their vision to reality with an AI coder that can not only write code for small components but also:

1. Write a suggested spec.

2. Convert the spec to a task list

3. Write all the code on that task list

4. Verify the code

5. And more…

Copilot Workspace can take in your entire codebase and propose step-by-step tasks to turn your existing app into your desired vision.

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Today, I imagined for the first time what it would feel like to see AI working with an entrepreneur through their product vision, challenging assumptions diplomatically when appropriate, adapting and drawing wireframes, and creating a roadmap. I imagined it, and let myself experience the feelings that came up.

It was a sinking feeling. A groundless feeling. Like getting fired from a job - which luckily I’ve only experienced once.

And many of us know now that this moment is coming for us, sooner or later. I would argue that in principle - no occupation is safe.

In dealing with this groundlessness I turned to my Buddhist training, which taught me to let go of the narrow identity of “product designer”. What arose in its place, as often does, is this deeper, more expansive identity. That of a participant in a dynamic, interdependent, and evolving reality. The reality which I’ve begun to call The Great Dance.

I will write about change, technology, the future — and finding meaning within this vortex of a world.

Let’s dance.

One of the most tragic aspects of the accelerating pace of change, and rapid evolution of new technologies — is that we as humanity have lost our elders. We begin to see older generations as detached from the current world of innovation, and have to discount advice and experiences gained in an age that feels so different from our own.

Wherea…

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Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is an Israeli-born, Jewish educator, writer, and performance artist. He's the creator of Storahtelling, Inc. and the founding spiritual leader of Lab/Shul in NYC, an artist-driven, everybody friendly, God-optional, pop-up experimental community for sacred Jewish gatherings.

Amichai is a member of the Global Justice Fe…

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Jerry Colonna is the CEO and co-founder of Reboot.io, an executive coaching and leadership development firm whose coaches and facilitators are committed to the notion that better humans make better leaders.

For nearly 20 years, he has used the knowledge gained as an investor, an executive, and a board member for more than 100 organizations t…

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Kathy Davies wears many hats - she’s a Design Lecturer at Stanford University. She's the Managing Director of the Stanford Life Design lab, where she and her team have trained 150 universities globally to use the life design processes on their campuses to help students design, prototype, and test the right career paths for them.

She is also …

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Vicki Tan is a Product Designer, a public speaker, a student of Behavioral Psychology, and a dog mom based in Brooklyn. She currently works at Spotify, and has previously worked at Headspace, Lyft, and Google. She cares deeply about the human aspects of design, and the insights that data cannot provide. In her spare time, she's working on a…

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Dr. Geci Karuri-Sebina is a futurist, urban planning thinker, and the author of Innovation Africa: Emerging Hubs of Excellence. She's a faculty member at Singularity University South Africa with a focus on urban futures, including smart cities, networks, urban planning, governance and development, and innovation systems. She's an associate …

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Dan Formosa consults with companies and organizations worldwide on design and innovation. He was an early proponent of “design for all” (a.k.a. Inclusive Design). He lectures internationally on design, research, and the future of design, and is the recipient of numerous design awards.

Dan holds degrees in product design, ergonomics, and biom…

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Greg Hoffman is Nike's former Chief Marketing Officer, a global brand leader, advisor, and speaker, and the author of Emotion by Design: Creative Leadership Lessons From a Life at Nike.

In his book, Greg shares lessons and stories on the power of creativity drawn from almost three decades of experience within the company. It's a celebration …

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Today, I'm speaking to Richard D. Bartlett, aka Rich Decibels.

During the Occupy movement in 2011, Rich caught a glimpse of a different way of being together — more compassionate, more intelligent, more creative, inclusive, and animating than he'd experienced as a student worker or citizen up to that point. Since then, he's been on a mission…

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Irene Au is Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, where she works with early-, mid-, and late-stage startup CEOs. She is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods, practices, processes, leadership, talent, and quality. Irene has unprecedented experience elevating the s…

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Jay McClelland is a Computational Cognitive Neuroscientist and one of the founding fathers of the field of neural networks and deep learning in the 1980s, which led directly to today's explosion in AI and machine learning algorithms that are transforming our lives. He is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerl…

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