Future of AI

`1:45:25`

It's here for gaming. It's here for some specialized applications. My oldest loves playing Gorilla Tag. I dunno if you've tried that. That's basically the hottest VR game. Wonderful, it's great. It's really hard to predict the future 'cause we just don't know. And then when you factor in AI and you have even the smartest people go like, I don't think we fully understand how this works. — But then on the flip side, you have Moore's Law that seems to have worked for many, many, many years in decreasing the size of transistor, for example. So like you know, Flash didn't take over the internet, but Moore's Law worked. So we don't know which one AI is. — Which one it is. And this is what I find so fascinating too. I forget who did this presentation, but someone in the web community, this great presentation on the history of the airplane. So you go from the Wright brothers flying in, what? 1903 or something like that. And 40 years later you have a jet flight.

`1:46:27`

Just an unbelievable amount of progress in four decades. Then in '56, I think it was, the halt the sign for the Boeing 747 essentially precursor was designed and basically nothing has happened since. Just minor tweaks and improvements on the flying experience since the '50s. Somehow, if you were to predict where flying was gonna go, and you were sitting in 42 and you'd seen, you'd remember the Wright brothers flying in '03, and you were seeing that jet engines coming, you're like, we're gonna fly to to the stars in another two decades. We're gonna invent super mega hypersonic flights that's gonna traverse the earth in two hours. And then that didn't happen. It tapped out. This is what's so hard about predicting the future. We can be so excited in the moment because we're drawing a line through early dots on a chart, and it looks like those early dots are just going up into the right, and sometimes it's just flatten out. This is also one of those things

`1:47:28`

where we have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL. That about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply that there's a lot, it's possible for society to lose a competence. It's still needs because it's chasing the future. COBOL is still with us. This is one of the things I think about with with programming. Ruby on Rails is at such a level now that in 50 years from now, it's exceedingly likely that there's still a ton of Ruby on Rail systems running around. And very hard to predict what that exact world is gonna be like. But yesterday's weather tells us that if there's still COBOL code from the '70s operating social security today, and we haven't figured out a clean way to convert that, let alone understand it, we should certainly be humble about predicting the future. I don't think any of the programmers who wrote that COBOL code back in the '70s had any damn idea that in 2025, checks were still being cut off the business logic that they had encoded back then. But that just brings me to the conclusion on the question

`1:48:30`

for what should a young programmer do? You're not gonna be able to predict the future. No one's gonna be able to predict the future. If you like programming, you should learn programming. Now, is that gonna be a career forever? I don't know, but what's gonna be a career forever? Who knows? Like a second ago, we thought that it was the blue collar labor that was gonna be extracted first. It was the robots that were gonna take over. Then GenAI comes out, and then all the artists suddenly look like, "Holy shit, is this gonna do all animation now? Is gonna do all music now?" They get real scared. And now I see the latest Tesla robot going like, oh, maybe we're back now to blue collar being in trouble. Because if it can dance like that, it can probably fix a toilet. So no one knows anything, and you have to then position yourself for the future in such a way that it doesn't matter that you pick a profession or path where if it turns out that you have to retool and re-skill, you're not gonna regret the path you took.

`1:49:30`

That's a general life principle. For me, how I look at all endeavors I involve myself in is I want to be content with all outcomes. When we start working on a new product at 37signals, I set up my mental model for its success. And I go, do you know what? If no one wants this, I will have had another opportunity to write beautiful Ruby code, to explore Greenfield domain, to learn something new, to build a system I want, even if no one else wants it. What a blessing. What a privilege. If a bunch of people want it, that's great. We can pay some salaries, we can keep the business running, and if it's a blow away success, wonderful. I get to impact a bunch of people. — I think one of the big open questions to me is how far you can get with vibe coding, whether an approach for a young developer to invest most of the time it's into vibe coding or into writing code from scratch. So vibe coding, meaning,