The more our individual capabilities expand and, at the same time, we're able to integrate in countless ways, the more paradoxically we depend on shared languages and standards to stay connected.
In our organizational work, we see the same dynamic: micro-enterprises can only operate as truly autonomous, differentiated nodes if they share contracts, semantics, and protocols with the broader system. At the individual level, as at the organizational one, uniqueness without a common grammar quickly collapses into isolation.
The greater our ability to scale the self, the greater the need for communication commons
Ty for reading and sharing! Agreed it’s inevitable we need shared systems, but it’s an entirely new paradigm to construct given the new base unit of scale imo versus just adapting the old coordination systems. There will be a tug of war, a pendulum swing, between building to scale the individual and building to standardize the society in terms of work, play, and life
As always thought provoking post however the way I am reading it, I would take other side of this point. Yes everyone is becoming more productive but this means you will just need team of powerful solo people building more powerful tools. AI is still not delivering what it had been promising, it constantly breaks and hallucinates etc.
"The individual with AI is eating the collective without ai."
Half agree! Not debating that the collective will get smarter with AI, but my point being that the collective is smarter significantly due to the fact that the individuals within the collective now have tools that give them exponential leverage. Somewhat semantic but also interesting to me how the indivdual itself is becoming a collective as a result. Re: hallucinations, etc. yes, but over a long enough arc it’ll be 80/20 at least. I think we have yet to see the big unlock in personalized health / medicine, education, etc. as well where it’ll be even more life changing in some respects.
Somewhat related to our IRL convo - wonder if one consequence is individual leverage that projects onto various points on the spectrum of artistic (ideas to be explored) vs instrumental (goals to be achieved). If so, where along the spectrum is a tool that motivates the greatest building of network; does an artist want a collective more than someone being provided a tool to help get their job done
Yep, this is a good direction to explore, more intuitively feels like human collaborators are more valuable than tool-extensions of self when it comes to art (though there are many creative tools that are attacking this spectrum). “Art” is general can be exception to all “utility” upgrades if we abstract away from details.
Because art sometimes doesn't know what to be, what it needs is a good place to live -- agree that you can't really "upgrade" art because a better QOL for art is not always "higher resolution"; it's room to roam
Yep, this is a good direction to explore, more intuitively feels like human collaborators are more valuable than tool-extensions of self when it comes to art (though there are many creative tools that are attacking this spectrum). “Art” is general can be exception to all “utility” upgrades if we abstract away from details.
i think youd prolly also find npc-studio and the npc tools to be even more exponentially amplifying of capabilities with its unification of disparate AI tooling and localization to one's actual computer
@anu this nails the paradox: AI supertools scale the individual beyond anything we’ve seen, but the real frontier is when ‘platforms of one’ learn to collaborate. The moment we move from solo scaling to synergistic scaling might define the next era of business
Generously assuming that AI competency pans out, I’m not sure that the probable outcome is individuals ending up with exponential leverage. If everyone adopts something, that something has much less relative value. If relative value drops, leverage disappears.
More probable is that the collective baseline just changes.
In my opinion, this "Selft" has an extensibility constraint—not for the capability but for the leverage.
It ought to miss certain dimensions which might not show up in the metrics but it could be in the strength, or in the senses. When a farmer builds an in-house farm for their own needs, it serves as a small self-sustainable ecosystem but it has a shelf-life and it is still a part of the system—the periphery.
Gosh, this is great.
"At the logical extreme of the great leverage inversion, the boundary between individual and collective erodes."
I think this captures beautifully something I’ve tried to explain here https://www.boundaryless.io/blog/a-common-language-for-the-platform-organization/
The more our individual capabilities expand and, at the same time, we're able to integrate in countless ways, the more paradoxically we depend on shared languages and standards to stay connected.
In our organizational work, we see the same dynamic: micro-enterprises can only operate as truly autonomous, differentiated nodes if they share contracts, semantics, and protocols with the broader system. At the individual level, as at the organizational one, uniqueness without a common grammar quickly collapses into isolation.
The greater our ability to scale the self, the greater the need for communication commons
Ty for reading and sharing! Agreed it’s inevitable we need shared systems, but it’s an entirely new paradigm to construct given the new base unit of scale imo versus just adapting the old coordination systems. There will be a tug of war, a pendulum swing, between building to scale the individual and building to standardize the society in terms of work, play, and life
As always thought provoking post however the way I am reading it, I would take other side of this point. Yes everyone is becoming more productive but this means you will just need team of powerful solo people building more powerful tools. AI is still not delivering what it had been promising, it constantly breaks and hallucinates etc.
"The individual with AI is eating the collective without ai."
Half agree! Not debating that the collective will get smarter with AI, but my point being that the collective is smarter significantly due to the fact that the individuals within the collective now have tools that give them exponential leverage. Somewhat semantic but also interesting to me how the indivdual itself is becoming a collective as a result. Re: hallucinations, etc. yes, but over a long enough arc it’ll be 80/20 at least. I think we have yet to see the big unlock in personalized health / medicine, education, etc. as well where it’ll be even more life changing in some respects.
Yeh super interested in health space to see how things unlock !
Somewhat related to our IRL convo - wonder if one consequence is individual leverage that projects onto various points on the spectrum of artistic (ideas to be explored) vs instrumental (goals to be achieved). If so, where along the spectrum is a tool that motivates the greatest building of network; does an artist want a collective more than someone being provided a tool to help get their job done
Yep, this is a good direction to explore, more intuitively feels like human collaborators are more valuable than tool-extensions of self when it comes to art (though there are many creative tools that are attacking this spectrum). “Art” is general can be exception to all “utility” upgrades if we abstract away from details.
Because art sometimes doesn't know what to be, what it needs is a good place to live -- agree that you can't really "upgrade" art because a better QOL for art is not always "higher resolution"; it's room to roam
agreed, well said
Yep, this is a good direction to explore, more intuitively feels like human collaborators are more valuable than tool-extensions of self when it comes to art (though there are many creative tools that are attacking this spectrum). “Art” is general can be exception to all “utility” upgrades if we abstract away from details.
I wrote in my book two years ago, The social glue of need is melting by the fires of technology.
It’ll need to be found outside the devices, once we feel the effects of its absence
Chatbots don’t have warm bodies, or make babies
How much can the bots be programmed to bring us together
It’ll need to be found outside the devices, once we feel the effects of its absence
i think youd prolly also find npc-studio and the npc tools to be even more exponentially amplifying of capabilities with its unification of disparate AI tooling and localization to one's actual computer
https://github.com/npc-worldwide/npc-studio
https://github.com/npc-worldwide/npcsh
Wow that art alone is so beautiful, what is that from?
Cover art: Wall painting in the Stanzino delle Matematiche in the Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence, Italy). Painted by Giulio Parigi circa 1599-1600.
Does it evoke anything in you that you didn't write about in the article? Idk why I'm asking this! Substack is so fun
Leverage used to mean adding people. Now it means adding selves.
@anu this nails the paradox: AI supertools scale the individual beyond anything we’ve seen, but the real frontier is when ‘platforms of one’ learn to collaborate. The moment we move from solo scaling to synergistic scaling might define the next era of business
Generously assuming that AI competency pans out, I’m not sure that the probable outcome is individuals ending up with exponential leverage. If everyone adopts something, that something has much less relative value. If relative value drops, leverage disappears.
More probable is that the collective baseline just changes.
In my opinion, this "Selft" has an extensibility constraint—not for the capability but for the leverage.
It ought to miss certain dimensions which might not show up in the metrics but it could be in the strength, or in the senses. When a farmer builds an in-house farm for their own needs, it serves as a small self-sustainable ecosystem but it has a shelf-life and it is still a part of the system—the periphery.