Suggestions
Hugo Amsellem
Advisor at Keli Network Inc.
Building a Creator Accelerator at http://JellySmack.com & Writing about the Creator Economy at http://ArmTheCreators.com 💪
Highlights
sci-fi is coming WAY faster than expected. the bits exponential is hitting atoms & cells and we're gonna get 100 years of sci-fi in 5.
the tech is (almost) the easy part lol but getting THE PUBLIC on board is the hard part when you live in a democracy.
humans are not the problem, they adapt absurdly fast -put your grandmother in a waymo, she's bored after 36 seconds. nobody needs a narrative once they've touched the thing (twss).
but two things don't adapt that fast:
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institutions. regulation, permitting, litigation - every layer built to protect the public also delays the moment the public actually touches the tech. and in that gap, w/ nothing real to hold, people fantasize. negatively (cc @PessimistsArc). you can't be scared of a waymo you've ridden. you can be terrified of one you've only read about.
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culture. culture is collective sense-making, a society agreeing on what smth means, and that's slow & linear. the internet made information exponential and meaning chaotic - it behaves like weather now: emergent, bottom-up, unpredictable. faster info didn't make us agree faster on what things mean.
so the tech/culture gap keeps growing because tech is exponential but culture is not, and in the west that's dangerous bc our OS is democratic: the public HAS to be on board or they vote against it, institutions slow down even more, gap widens.
china has a different answer: zero friction on deployment, the public touches tech everywhere, narrative is positive. it works. but the story is top-down - polished, partially true, fragile. matter & meaning have to emerge bottom-up or the system explodes later. and in the meantime they get to use our open DNA against us: fake news on data centers, every public fear amplified. we can't do that back, and we don't have time to wait for the long term to prove us right.
what we have instead: a guy on a stage w/ real hardware, in public, where everything can fuck up. no editing, skin in the game, millions who saw it w/ their own eyes and nobody told them what to think. that's how sense-making works in a democracy.
non-bullshit narrative capital might be our best weapon in the race towards the future. we need a lot more of it, from a lot more founders, and we need institutions to stop standing between the public and the thing.
(sorry for the vomit session, i'm flying back to SF and got half inspired).

