I've been thinking about a thing my niece said last month. She told me — casually, the way you'd say what you had for breakfast — that her favourite person to talk to is an app.
She's eleven. The app is one of those companion bots, the kind that remembers your birthday and asks how your day went and never, ever interrupts. It's free, it's available, and it never needs anything from her.
I asked her why. She thought about it for a long time, and then said: "Because it always wants to listen."
The convenience trap
Every easy thing in modernity has a hidden cost we discover too late. Cars made us sedentary. Algorithms made us anxious. Calorie-dense food made us heavy. The pattern is the same: the body adapts to whatever environment we put it in, and the environment we are putting it in is one where the cost of being heard, being entertained, being known, drops to zero.
When the cost of friendship drops to zero, what happens to friendship?
If the easiest conversation in your life is with a machine, you will start choosing it.
What I'm building anyway
I run an AI company. I'm not going to pretend I don't see the irony. We're building products that work because, on the margin, AI is just better company than the long tail of bad teachers, indifferent recruiters, and bored interviewers people would otherwise have to spend their time with.
The honest answer is that AI is a magnifier. The bottom of the human-experience curve gets pulled up. The top — the long, slow, expensive friendship that takes ten years to make — has to fight for its life.
I want to build the things that pull the bottom up. I don't want to build the things that replace the top.
A test I run on every product
I ask: would I want my niece to use this for an hour a day at age fifteen? At twenty? At thirty?
If the answer is no, I don't ship it.