Surviving Internet Hate

`1:25:58`

But it all amounted to this moment. That is, to me, what makes the entire journey so meaningful. AI did not arrive from the sky. It was not alien technology that had blasted through the universe and suddenly showed up on our shores. AI has been around for as long as computer science has been around. In the '50s, they thought the problem was gonna be cracked in about a decade, the smartest people at the time. It took a little longer, but the reason it took a little longer was in part because we took some blind turns on the road to AI and neural networks and thought that there were other symbolic representations that were gonna carry the day, and they didn't. And that probably set us back about 15 years. So some of it was also we had to, Go through the gaming revolution, 3D games. If we had not had Quake, if we had not had Duke Nukem, if we had not had Unreal Tournament, we'd never have gotten AI because we would never have gotten the GPUs, and therefore we would never have been able to get AI in the shape it is now. So everything we did up until this moment was required to get there. You were part of that. Holy... What a blessing. What a blessing to have contributed in your small part, either by training or by playing video games. Literally, you could just choose to think of it that way. All those times you spent in, for my case, in the '90s just playing video games, they were-

`1:27:24`

Yeah, I was contributing to the AI revolution right there and then moment.

`1:27:39`

Take a moment. It's okay. Take a... And also, you don't even have to accept that it's all dead. Like, if you are still very attached to the hand chiseling, which if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that I would've been more attached. I'm surprised-

`1:27:59`

... a little that I've not been more attached. But the reason I've not been more attached, I think, is that I found something more fun. And if it hadn't been like that, if AI had just replaced the thing I loved and gave me something I hated, I'd probably be a little bitter.

`1:28:37`

I think Picasso is actually a good parallel because if you look at his early work where he learned his craft, it was painting realistic paintings, right? Like, he was training to be a master of the old ways of depicting reality the best way we knew how, and then along comes all these other forms of expression. Cubism comes along. And all these forms of abstract expression, he's not decrying that he's not doing Renaissance paintings anymore, that he's not just painting the perfect depiction of an apple. He's reimagining the apple to be a freaking square, and he's getting excited about that. And I feel that transition, that we've gone from this one mode of expression, and we've suddenly opened the gates where the, like, the color spectrum is so much wider. I'm seeing more. And it's perhaps because the way I became a programmer. I did not become a programmer because a deep love of if statements. I became a programmer because I wanted programs. I wanted things to exist that did not exist. And at first, I had to learn how to program to make that happen. Then I happened to fall in love with programming as a craft, and then I spent two decades really diving deep on that. But now I'm back. I'm back to having an idea and being impatient beyond belief to see it exist in the world, and AI has just shrunk that down to almost nothing. So it's an acceleration of a rediscovery. Now, I understand that that's not true for everyone.

There are plenty of programmers who just loved programming right from the beginning, and they were attracted to the logical constructs and so forth. I mean, I've been there for two decades, so I get it. But I also think that you're able to discover new sides of yourself-... if you let it in. Again, I keep coming back to this almost regret minimization framework, to borrow Jeff Bezos's terms here. Are you gonna look at yourself two years from now and think, "Oh, I spent my time well being pissy about the present, about the fact that my industry changed"? Or Would I two years from now look back upon this moment and be proud of myself for leaning in, for maybe having a moment of grief? Again, there's room for all of it. And then going, "I'm gonna learn how the world spins now, and I'm gonna make not just the best of it, I'm gonna make more of it."

`1:31:30`

I have had more fun with computers in the last three months than at any time previously.