Elon Musk said something in an interview yesterday that helped me articulate a design goal I’ve been circling for the last two years, as I work on this big side project I've been refining.
There’s a category mismatch in the AI discussion that we need to move past.
Jobs,
Org Charts,
Global supply chains.
Meetings.
Tasks.
Assets.
Collateral.
These are human abstractions. Coordination hacks we developed to manage large groups of people under constraint.
I just don't think they're the right primitives for the world that’s coming.
Musk’s framing was simple: forget the details. Instead, think about outputs.
What is a corporation, really, if not its outputs?
Nvidia employs legions of people to produce CAD files, design specs, and marketing material.
Apple’s outputs are design specs, an extremely specific aesthetic, and a steady stream of terrible papers about AI.
The real shift that’s coming is the total democratization of scale.
AI won’t replace people, but it will make certain categories of organization entirely obsolete.
The people you least expect will produce outputs that rival billion-dollar companies today.
And, just wait til you see what your grandchildren do for school projects.
We’re already starting to see the larval stages of this.
Once you start thinking in long horizons and persistent agent swarms, the notion of “jobs” as we understand the concept today completely evaporates.
What remains is governance, memory, and of course... taste.
Turns out, Claire Silver was right.
Now go make yourself some outputs.