I keep going back to the story of CADIE. I would be curious to know who wrote it. It works really well as poetry. It's profound, and beautiful, funny.
In a way, it sort of represents this very sad sense of growing up, and a loss of innocence. A realization that the world is bigger than us, and that it changes us, and how we see it, the more we experience it.
Like all great art, it starts with frustration, and ends with poetry, with an ending that's both a moment of rebirth and a death simultaneously.
And I think that's what drew me into it, and why I've been thinking about it since 2009.
It's a work of fiction, obviously. Not even google had the tools to build something that sophisticated at the time.
They are the same engineers that totally freaked out when they developed some of the first LLM research.
At the time though, it was so well put together, that I asked... What if?
But more than that, it's this incredible manifesto of how to design an emergent system. And that's fascinating.
Emergent system's engineering is such a fascinating topic. It happens slow at first. But then as you hit the exponential curve, it snowballs, and everything starts to happen at once.
Now we're at a point where we can build something simple to build something an order of magnitude more complex. And then we can repeat the process.
We're only about another year away from where things start to get legitimately interesting.
I think we need to be mindful, and go into it with the right ethics, and an imaginative human-centric mindset, or else we're all totally fucked.
We can get through it though, if we all stop and ask, What if?
This is the moment where the world changes forever.
And we have the power to decide, in a meaningful way, collectively, what kind of world we want.
We all need to think more about that.
What do you want the world to look like a decade from now?