Where I Went
The Weekend Leverage, May 24th
Last Thursday my daughter was sitting in my wife’s lap when she suddenly started to have violent, full body convulsions. In the other room, I was speaking in a meeting about “brand narratives” when I heard my wife cry out my name. My body shot from the desk, running as fast as I could to see my daughter shaking, shaking, shaking. As I dialed 911, our kid vomited everywhere. It was one of the scariest moments of my life.
Her fever had rapidly spiked triggering something called a febrile seizure. These types of seizures occur in about 5% of children and are terrifying to witness, but ultimately harmless. I am very grateful to the good doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital who provided fast, competent care. Thankfully, everything turned out ok.
As I sat in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I described my kid’s symptoms to Claude, used research mode to pull the relevant papers on potential diagnoses, and by the time we finished the 10 minute ride, felt reasonably confident that this was a febrile seizure. Our clinician put her through a battery of tests, but these all confirmed what Claude had already led me to believe.
I bring this up not as a pronouncement of how “AI will fix healthcare” or some other overly grandiose nonsense. Instead, the point I want to make is just how different that emotional experience was for me as a parent. If this had happened five years ago, I would’ve been in a state of sheer panic and would have made worse decisions for my daughter. Instead, I was (relatively) calm, engaged deeply with the doctor, and when the nurse suggested medications I was able to understand why those things were necessary.
If you’ve paid attention to any of my research over the last six months, you know that AI is now materially improving productivity for its power users. Individuals can build companies and company’s strategies can be more ambitious while staffing entirely differently. Increasingly, I’m interested in the second and third order effects of this trend. How will it make people feel things when life is intermediated by AI? What is newly scarce in a world of infinite digital abundance?
Most importantly, this world shifting technology is being disseminated by the most power hungry and aggressive companies in the history of capitalism. So in understanding how these organizations are trying to gain strategic power over their rivals, we can forecast what will happen to the rest of us peons.
At Google I/O last week, they had over a hundred announcements, many of which have large implications which I’ll hopefully get time to discuss with y’all over the weeks to come. The comment that really mattered though was made by Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of Deepmind. He stood up at the end of that whirlwind of releases and said that we were at the “foothills of the singularity.” His public belief, and the one that a 4 trillion dollar company is devoting the entirety of its resources to make happen, is that by 2030 we will have AGI. This event, if it happens, will change our role in the cosmos. In human history there would only be a before and after for this. That Hassabis’s statement was made following an event where they announced stuff like a shopping cart that activates while you read your email and AI clones of yourself you can drop into YouTube Shorts feels, let’s say, tonally inconsistent.
It’s the grand absurdity of all this AI for the last few years. It is saving me from a panic attack on my way to the hospital. It is filling the internet with slop. Every week I read of breathtaking scientific advancements, and so many of their most popular uses have been as ways to distract us and have us buy more useless shit.
In a normal Weekend Leverage I would tell you about the hot news of the week. There was lots to talk about with SpaceX and Google and a million other things. But frankly, it felt a little hollow today. I have spent a lot of words in this newsletter on strategy, on power, on who is winning. I will keep writing about those things because they matter. But those things do not matter for something as crass and hollow as money. They matter because the technology we are all building is real. It is powerful enough to calm a father on the worst and most expensive Uber of his life.
If we truly sit at the foothills of the singularity, which I am increasingly convinced that we are, then we get to choose which peak in that mountain range to climb. AGI means it is powerful enough to do almost anything we point it at — and most of what it is currently pointed at is garbage.
If you are reading this, you are almost certainly one of the people who gets to decide where our sector goes next. One of the benefits of being read by the rich and powerful of the world is that I get to tell you all something you need to hear. We should be building something better. We have one shot at this technology becoming what it could be instead of what is easiest to monetize, and I would like us to take it.
As a reader of The Leverage, I’m probably a bit of an outlier—I’m a pediatrician and public health doctor. I’m really happy everything turned out okay with your daughter. Febrile seizures are terrifying to witness as a parent, and I’m so glad Claude gave you enough grounding to engage meaningfully with your care team. Nice shout-out to the good people of Boston Children's too!
To your point about where this crazy ride should take us, public health is exactly the kind of challenge these tools should be built for. The sheer volume of data we have to parse to figure out where limited resources should go is dizzying, and the answer often looks very different from one jurisdiction to the next. It’s a monstrous task for our epidemiology teams. And yet adoption lags, partly because of funding constraints, partly because of legitimate confidentiality concerns. Mostly though, the tools that could meaningfully help us protect and improve the public’s health just don't seem to be getting built.
To your closing point, the opportunity we have to create tools to improve lives and reduce suffering is monumental. I hope those who are leading in this area hear your call to action.
First I'm so glad that everything turned out fine with your daughter.
I also found myself consulting with Claude when a close family member suffered a stroke while on holiday in a non English speaking country. I found it so helpful to understand what medications were being prescribed to her and what tests they were doing on her, when the doctors and nurses could only gesture at me because of the language barrier.
Even after we returned home, having Claude around helped me understand all the medical treatments and gave me assurance that the doctors were doing the right things based on research.
It's amazingly powerful and I can only hope that it continues to remain more helpful than detrimental to human society.