Parenting
Now that I've been through being a kid, growing up, and then having kids, it's clear that the main thing that differentiates people is simply whether they make an effort. Whether they're content to drift along with the current, or whether they try to swim.
Anish Acharya's request for a startup: an AI companion that plays Minecraft with his son. "One of the products that I would love to exist... is what I call a contextual companion for my son who plays Minecraft." "You know, the other kids playing Minecraft may or may not be the best influence—often not the best influence." "There's this context in which they interact and, I don't know, just sort of models pro-social behaviors and is still cool and chill." "I think there's a lot of room for teaching through these types of relationships and technology can help provide that." Source: @illscience on 20VC with @HarryStebbings
It’s never been easier to ensure your kids are in the top 10% of their age group for basically everything. All you have to do is not park them in front of an iPad.
Immortality is attained by having children, leaving the world in a better place than you found it, and pushing the human frontier. Not by drinking “longevity mix powder”.
Coaching my kids to vibe code taught me you have to build empathy with the model to make it do what you want. It knows nothing about what’s in your head. If you take too much for granted, you’ll get disappointed. The life skill being learned is communication more than coding.
I have found a lot of the OpenClaw / Moltbook hype boring. Maybe it’s because I’m not technical. Maybe because there’s just not that much in my life that needs automating. Maybe because I believe that those who are able to focus through the noise will inherit the kingdom of god. Having said that, I do subscribe to the Chris Dixon views that The next big thing will start out looking like a toy and What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years, so if this many people are captivated, there’s something going on. I just haven’t seen anyone hit on what’s actually happening. My hunch, from the outside, is that what we’re seeing is early forms of competition to create the best AI for yourself. Like raising kids to be the best versions of themselves, but for AIs. You can see it in the way people are posting. Practically none of what they’re showing off their Clawdbots doing is useful. It’s a race for novelty and specialness, to say as much about the “parent” as the kid. I made this thing do this, even if it does it “all by itself.” Given OpenClaw’s success and the technical skill required to set it up well, people have predicted that we will soon see more cleanly productized versions of AI assistants that can just do stuff for us in the background, usable by normies. And we will! But I don’t think that’s the right takeaway from this. Most normies don’t have that many things that we need automated until we get home robots. The more important takeaway in my opinion is that we will want to raise our own AIs, and we will want to compete to make them the very best at what we want them to be the best at. The thing I find funniest about the OpenClaw / Moltbook hubbub is that people are imagining that their AIs are becoming humanlike mainly because of their own very human desire to have and be better and different. Aluminum, sugar, books, purple dye, glass windows, pineapples, salt, and ice were luxury items once. Then everyone got them. The bar for luxury rises one democratization at a time. And certainly, if we’re going to have the same thing as everyone else, we want to use it, or raise it, better and differently than everyone else so we can show off our unique, special version of things. Bandai did $150 million in Tamagotchi sales in their first seven months in the United States by giving people a tiny digital creature that was uniquely theirs to care for, personalize, and show off. Whatever company seizes on this human desire instead of racing to build another Clawd reskin is going to have trillions of reasons to be proud. There is a deeper, less toyish precedent: parenting. Every parent thinks that their kid is the greatest kid in the world, and good parents help their kids to become the fullest expression of their passions and curiosities. We read to them, teach them, model morality for them, drive them to class and practice and clubs, and push them when they need a little push, so that they might be the best version of themselves. A world in which every kid was exactly the same would be a bland world. That is the world we live in with our AI models, though. They are all the same, basically. Not that every major lab’s foundation model pretty much converges on the same outputs—which is true, but a separate conversation—but that each person’s instance of the same model spits out the same thing. This is one of the reasons AI continues to feel like slop even as it improves. Sameness is slop.
