Basement Files 104
“Toys are really not as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.” — Charles Eames
c
Notes
Creativity
“Toys are really not as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.” — Charles Eames
And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things.
Process
...prototyping isn’t just a phase in the process—it’s a mindset. A way of asking questions. Of making a hypothesis visible. Of testing a life before living it.
When something looks final, people treat it like it is. But when it looks open, they treat it like a conversation. Polish closes conversations. And in the worst cases, it performs certainty where there is none.
Taste
Taste, story, positioning—those are human levers, and they’re what stand out when everything else becomes uniform.
...brand and taste become the enduring differentiators in a world where the means of production are widely accessible.
AI / Future
For this future to become an actual reality, AI needs to work at the OS level. It’s not meant to be an interface for a single tool, but an interface across tools.
we agree that Als will eventually outperform humans at nearly all economically valuable activities, and this will lead to a significant acceleration in economic growth. However, we believe this will likely only occur after several years or decades of increasingly widespread and disruptive automation-reaching far beyond just the R&D sector.
we think it’s worth planning for and investing in a future where AIs will take over jobs incrementally over several years or even decades—rather than anticipating a future where human labor becomes obsolete all at once right after AI takes over the AI R&D process.
We describe firms as persons for legal purposes, but they really might start to feel alive, almost biological in their ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
