Looks like birthday posts are a tradition now. Last year's post is a bit short, but here: 35.
This year I couldn't quite decide which direction to go. It's a birthday post, so one would think it should be motivational, inspiring, perhaps full of optimism for the future.
I continue to not be ambitious enough. And perhaps, the ceiling of ambition is now rising faster than my ambition will ever be able to grow. This is... a good thing? I suppose it might be. All actions are having their activation energy reduced with the advancement of AI. What people argue is unachievable today is a saturated benchmark two months from now. It spreads across fields more and more distant from its home (my home) - computers - and begins to influence atoms at an increasing pace and scale.
This is... also good? I will probably own a humanoid robot in the medium distant future. It will fold my laundry. I am excited for that. Am I insane to think I'll have a robot to fold my laundry, or am I showing my lack of ambition again, thinking that folding my laundry will be at all a consequential aspect of the machine, once I possess it?
I don't know.
The other direction for these times, the one that seems easier, is worry. Is it in bad taste to write of worry on a birthday post? Ah well...
I worry about us. I worry about the biosphere as well as the culture. For the cultural issues we're dealing with, Supernormal Stimuli are on my mind a lot, both when I myself struggle with my screen habits, but also when I see what kind of opinions people have from being exposed to the online so much.
I never had a crisis of age before. 30 seemed like it should have triggered one, but it didn't. I always felt like I was growing in my career, and the career itself was growing with ever more opportunity for what the future might hold. My relationships and hobbies were also going well, I felt like I was evolving through time, sometimes in a two steps forward, one step back kind of way, but forward on average.
This year though, I'm starting to lose the thread a bit. I find that where meaning once came from the challenges I overcame in cognitive work, I've lost that a bit, about as much as AI is involved with the task. I used to be proud of myself when I made something 50% faster, or cost half as much. Now that same outcome comes from simply typing "Make it 50% cheaper" to Claude, and he does it.
I've never made more things in my life than I did in the last 12 months. This I am proud of. As easy as it is to let AI diminish that feeling, I am incredibly happy that I keep my creative juices flowing and produce things that sometimes no one ever opens again, and other times they spend a few days at the top of Hacker News, and I get hundreds of thousands of visitors, and incredible amounts of feedback.
To have ideas, pure ideas whose origin isn't necessarily financial gain, or prestige, but merely the desire to bring them into existence, and to succeed, there lies joy for me. It is a form of meditation, and of self exploration. I just need to remember the times when I had so many ideas, but lacked the knowledge to do nearly all of them. That's a good reminder, because those times are over. Knowledge looks like it might never be a bottleneck for creation again, or at least not until my ambition grows by an order of magnitude. And I much prefer this state of things to the one before.
And of course there is dance. Dance keeps me human, and... sane? Perhaps sane isn't the right word, more accurate would be to say it keeps me from existing merely in the cognitive realm every waking moment. Minds weren't meant to do that quite as much as it is on the table to do so these days, I think.
So, onward we go, up the slope of the exponential.
And good luck to us all.