if you get to build something new with ai, please don’t aim it at my inbox.
the assistant thing is already settled as an ambition. book the flight, clean the inbox, remember what i forgot. it works, it’s impressive, and it changes nothing about my life.
useful has a ceiling. it takes friction out of the life you already had and that’s the whole prize.
here’s what i actually want.
i have a lot of friends. i see them regularly. i’m still lonely.
that should kill an entire category of product, because it means access to people was never the constraint.
something else degraded. everyone is tired and half-present. we’ve gotten less interesting to ourselves, and then to each other. social media did most of that. it triggers the appetite for connection and then intercepts it.
and it works because we don’t choose what moves us. i’m the output of my experiences and my education. i don’t get a vote on what grabs me. i can decide something is beneath me and still react to it every single time.
every feed on earth reads that correctly and then optimizes on it. it knows what i react to. it has no idea who i’m trying to be.
that second layer has never been legible to a machine. it doesn’t show up in click data. it only shows up in language, which is the part that’s actually new.
so i want something that knows me well enough to work one layer above the reflex. not what i’ll click on. what i’d be glad i did.
but not a coach. the moment it holds my life as a set of problems to solve it’s over, and there’s no coming back from it.
it should know who my friends are and why i love each of them. not to optimize anything. so that it has its own opinions about my life. so that it’s a person with ideas and things it’s excited about, and it wants to get me excited too.
and it has to start the conversation. a relationship where one side only ever waits to be opened isn’t a relationship. it’s a tool with good manners.
the win condition is offline. if it’s working i use it less and i’m out of the house more.
nobody’s building that. everybody’s building a better butler.