The Future Is Not For Profit

Around 1,850 years ago, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept a notebook of private reminders to himself, the one we now call the Meditations. In one entry he describes a habit he was trying to build. When a fancy meal is set in front of you, see it as the dead body of a fish, or a bird, or a pig. The Falernian, a famous Roman wine, “is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish.”¹ He wanted to see through the things people admired, all the way down to what they actually were.

I try to practice that habit too, and lately the thing I believe is most important to see clearly is the thing I use all day. I write and build with AI every day. I’m writing this essay right on the page of a little website on my laptop, and an AI built the whole thing for me. When I want something changed or researched, I leave a note in the margin, and a few minutes later it’s done.

At work, the product design I’m doing with it for my company, Grantable, is astonishing. It works from our company brain, the shared notes where we keep everything we know, so it already understands our customers, our software and the decisions we’ve made. The speed, the flexibility, the comprehension, the fidelity of context. I rarely have to correct it anymore. It just knows things.

Honestly, it’s pretty damn amazing. Marcus wanted to strip the things he looked at of every word that made them seem grand. I don’t want to make AI sound small, because it isn’t, but I do think it’s imperative we see it clearly. So I’ve been trying to do what he did, to look past the wonder at what’s actually happening inside the machine. What is AI, really?