In The Twilight Zone episode ‘Time Enough at Last,’ a bank teller named Henry Bemis loves to read, but the daily responsibilities of life constantly get in the way.
One day, he sneaks into the bank’s vault during his lunch break, book in hand. While he’s down there, a hydrogen bomb levels everything above him.
He climbs out of the vault and discovers he might be the last person left. Alone and distraught, he wanders the wreckage until he finds the remains of the public library along with thousands of books.
In a selfish moment of joy, he realizes his opportunity.
He collects the books and sorts them into piles. As he bends down to open the first one, his glasses slip off his face.
He scrambles to find them in his now blurry world, only to discover they’re broken.
“That’s not fair,” he mutters. “There was time now.”
I can’t imagine a better description of San Francisco right now.
We’re the most empowered we’ve ever been. Almost overnight, we’ve all got superpowers that make the products of our dreams not just possible, but comically easy. Whether it’s something we fantasized about for years, or an impulse that woke us up in the middle of the night, we can pass it off to Sol or Opus and a surprise awaits us in the morning.
This should be thrilling, but it’s harder than ever to find a quest.
The Bitter Lesson looms large. Brittle, handcrafted rules lose to general methods and more compute. It was true for AI research. And as we’ve scaled it up, it’s become true for software generally.
It also appears to be true of organizations too. How many startups were just handcrafted answers to a specific problems? The big labs are a general solution with loads of compute.
Large companies used to be cumbersome and slow, but the labs are moving nimbly across a huge surface, shipping products for code, finance, security, biology and more. We’ve always been a gold rush town, but these veins ran particularly deep.
Anthropic is a 5-year-old company of 5,300 people going public at $1.4 trillion.
There’s a cosmic comedy of it that I find myself sharing with people around the bay. We can finally build all these things, but the world doesn’t need us to. The model will get to it eventually.
There’s still work to do. Just not the kind we were all geared up to do.
Which leaves an existential ‘drat’ in the air.
There was time now.