The Wisdom to Swim

I'm back at Coffee Bean, Nu Empire, to continue my ramblings on any subject that pops into my mind at the moment. I've been tremendously busy for the past week, working on various personal projects. I'm glad that my mind is brimming with ideas again.  

I've been vibe-coding a lot, creating experimental apps to test various ideas. The ease with which I could churn out an app helps me refine my ideas faster. Coding is fun again with the help of AI agents. No longer do I have to spend hours labouring over the minutiae of programming languages; I simply express my intent, and these diligent agents handle the details. The quality of my code is directly proportional to the clarity of my prompts and the skill in nudging them towards my vision. As I've written in The Greatest Inflexion Point, we are on the cusp of another huge paradigm change. There will be upsides and downsides, but we've been here before. 

We all (well, at least people of my generation) rode the dot-com boom. It was a crazy period of booms and busts; this AI revolution will be similar. Just that this is happening at an even more frenetic pace. Bubbles will form and burst everywhere, but that's expected when the industry is boiling hot. It's a natural consequence of human greed. Change will still come, and it is inevitable. The same heady excitement is in the air. 

Before smartphones and messaging apps like WhatsApp became ubiquitous, there was a thriving SMS value-added services industry — one I had personally been involved in. Of course, SMS and the feature phone itself killed off another industry: the pager service, which thankfully I never had to use.  

We, humans, have come a long way since the Industrial Revolution. Technology helped us to realise and amplify our deepest desires and intentions. And with each technological leap, new habits and norms are formed. Now we have people living most of their lives on social media, glued to their smartphones,  getting their dopamine fix from TikTok and YouTube.  We experience needs in all levels of our existence: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. (Read The Four Layer Stack). Technology is merely a tool to satiate those needs.

Do not blame technology for the ills of society.  We've always known that the technological knife cuts both ways. We cannot amplify the positive without also boosting the negative. If anything, technology has actually helped us see ourselves with greater clarity: we are, at the core, creatures of our hormones and neurotransmitters. It is on us to use this knowledge to lift ourselves out of the morass of techno-induced addictions. 

We have all allowed ourselves to drown in an ocean of data and information.  Those who know how to swim will survive this flood. The swimmer instinctively leverages buoyancy, adjusting his body so that he floats and propels forward. The currents of change are swift and relentless, but in the end, those who have the wisdom to swim will find new shores.