Banks and schools and businesses should get in the business of simply vending APIs (or MCP connections). Agents and bots are taking away the need for the endless knobs and dials of traditional software. Just expose my data securely and my agent will do what I want with it, when I need it.
"Should get", so yea, not going to happen. The most obvious should get is exactly where we are now. What you're saying is "They should be forced to" which is just what we call laws and regulations regarding digital availability. Of course this is difficult to do since they will fight back monetarily against what they would consider perverse motivation to what we are already considering perverse motivations from them.
I felt very conflicted about this topic when I was young and working for Apple. I decided the Valley commute and rat race wasn’t very family conducive so I took a remote job and moved a few states over and it’s been great.
I’ve been fully remote for 12+ years now, and I’ve had a very successful career in engineering and engineering leadership. I also have eight kids that I get to spend a ton of time with. There’s a remote tax on career growth, but my RE side hustles have more than compensated for it.
Every now and then I wonder what might have been if I had stayed at Apple. No way to know for sure, but I probably couldn’t have afforded the family and lifestyle that I enjoy now.
There’s “how to be a good parent” advice and there’s also “oh boy how do we manage mealtimes and laundry and the school run” type advice. Someone with lots of kids is going to have great insights into the latter at very least.
I am the father, and I have a ton of involvement in the day-to-day work of running the house. This brings me and my wife a lot of satisfaction and it undoubtedly wouldn’t be possible if I was still commuting to work in Silicon Valley.
This feels like the obvious future. Everybody doom scrolls on their phones too much, but we can’t get rid of them because of the convenience of the productive things we can do when we need to.
So if there was a way to enable the productivity (or even multiply it, let’s be real) without the doomscrolling, a lot of people would go for that.
Not to mention the endless fiddling we’ve had to resort to with phones. We’ve gotten used to it, but apps for everything is such a cognitive burden on people. A screen-less AI assistant is the perfect solution for this. I can’t wait.
People like doomscrolling. They could uninstall their doomscroll apps, but they won't. This puck wouldn't stop most from doomscrolling either. Probably a few, but it's already possible for a few people to stop doomscrolling.
I keep seeing this argument, but there is nothing preventing anyone from purchasing a "dumb" phone. How would you envision multiplying your productivity in the day-to-day with a voice interface?
Great read. Ironic that he cited Pirsig because I think that reading ZATAOMM was the last time that I experienced this type of writing that made me pause and think deeply about what I just read.
