Korea Has No Room to Talk About 2030

Same 2030, different feeling

A developer friend I met that afternoon said this is what they always tell friends whose work has nothing to do with AI.

By around 2030, we won't be talking about whether AI replaces us. We'll be talking about whether to see AI as people.

My developer friend sees today's AI discussion as pretty shallow. Many experts are too busy to look far, and when my friend recently asked friends whose work has nothing to do with AI, the reaction was, wow, they truly have no idea. Everyone was placing the point where AI replaces them much too far away. My friend raises 2030 on purpose because ordinary people need time to prepare too. People who handle AI better than my friend will prepare on their own, but even they have little time to think deeply about the future after AI.

My friend had read a line in Seneca about how withdrawing from the crowd makes your worries fall away, and said the people anxious about AI are the ones who keep following AI news. Those who hear it every day get anxious, and to those who don't, all of it sounds like a story from the moon. Facing the same 2030, the two are standing that far apart.

Those who feel it first get out first

A friend who runs a startup told me that two friends of the most senior developer on his team quit development last week, saying they'd done as much as they could, and are looking for something else. He thinks the people who felt this change firsthand are the first to bolt.

On his team too, it was the developers who first suggested, “Wouldn't we be better off teaching AI?” So the team decided to personally teach, one at a time, people in the neighborhood asking “How do you use Codex?”, paid or not. There was even talk of opening an AI academy for elementary school kids, and he figured that since education makes money, everyone will end up heading that way.

At lunch that day, he'd told the developers they can't just code. They have to be able to do anything.

Right now content really is the moat, so let's think of ourselves as a content company.

Everyone needs their own content now, in his view, and has to do something, whether that's becoming an influencer or anything else. People who just want to keep doing what they always did will eventually get pushed out of the market. Startups take VC money and hope for a J-curve, so they often obsess from the start over whether the thing will scale, and end up doing nothing at all.

You think you know whether it scales? Does it scale? You scale it by doing it first.

I also think worrying only in your head ends up being ‘not knowing because you haven't tried.’ Knowing something in your head means nothing if you can't act on it. The people who feel it first move first, probably because they know you only learn by running into it.

How we work and how we make money are both changing

A colleague who runs Bloom with me strongly agreed with something heard at a Mixer: “AI will raise non-developers' productivity far more than developers'.” Preparing Bloom events, I also find there's far more admin than actual work, and I feel AI could take all of that. I joked that the ‘actual work’ is showing up an hour before the event and setting out chairs.

Someone I met at the lunch Mixer works in a heavily regulated industry, so it's hard even to judge whether automating is allowed given personal data. In places like that, the real barrier is security. But think it through, and we don't hand work to people because they handle personal data especially well. We have them sign a security pledge and trust them with it.

That's why people get security measures like access checks too. With safeguards like an internal network in place, there's no reason AI couldn't do the same. In fact, as models get lighter, quite a few places run them inside their internal networks.

At Friday's Mixer, someone said far more people flock to “how to make money with AI” than “how to work faster with AI.” It came from a person who'd experimented by posting short-form videos: videos about using AI productively got almost no response, while videos on easy ways to rack up views drew enormous crowds.

Some people already use personal AI agents as a family. With a service like Instinct, my agent talks to the other person's agent first, and that agent sums it up and passes it along. The way assistants coordinate first when scheduling between busy executives, they use agents to smooth over things that are awkward to bring up directly. It's convenient, but the reaction also had a bittersweet edge.

When every day is a weekend

My friend in the US said, “It'll become true that a lot of people aren't needed.” But my friend sees that as possibly a good thing in the end. If fewer people can run the systems that used to run more efficiently, that's tremendously good. Once systems can supply everything needed quickly and cheaply, everyone could ‘just play’ and still keep getting what they want. That was the logic.

I said people are social animals and would resent seeing someone else play. We keep comparing ourselves to each other and keep building hierarchies. People hate everyone being the same, and even when we dress alike, it bothers us when someone else's clothes are nicer. When I asked whether a world like that wouldn't still split into classes, my friend answered like this.

Not everyone has to play at the same thing. Everyone just gets the same opportunities, and what you pick is up to you. It's just that every day is a weekend.

I brought up something I'd heard somewhere, that “the companies on the AI frontier will all end up as bio companies,” and my friend said, “Doesn't that mean once you've solved all the world's problems, you go back to basic science?” At the lunch Mixer I'd said that people talk about an age of abundance coming, but I still don't know whether that'd be a good world. Between my friend picturing a world where every day is a weekend and the person saying they don't know about next month, honestly, I still don't know which side I'm on.

A place to bridge the gap

What my developer friend said about Bloom landed right here. The people on the AI frontier are too busy with research to talk about the big picture, and the people with the philosophical depth to discuss it don't know the technology. Someone has to unpack these conversations in between, and Korea has almost no place for that, which is why Bloom seems to shine, my friend said.

It'd be best if Bloom took over the whole AI conversation happening in Korea.

But my friend also said the US is flooded with AI discourse, and since AI has become a topic everyone cares about, no outlet covering it seems the least bit strange. Seen that way, my friend added the ‘painful point’ that nothing in Bloom's topics or approach comes to mind as especially hard to copy. For a community to last, it needs at least one person so obsessed with the topic that they'd keep digging into it even if nobody showed up, and a community ultimately has to become media.

I also find it hard in Seoul to find people who'll talk about life after AGI. For an event to be interesting it needs new stories you can't get on YouTube, and few people can deliver them. That's why my friend is preparing videos too. My friend thinks information-delivery YouTube doesn't have long left, and reads videos like that as transcripts anyway.

So instead of ‘videos that ferry information,’ my friend wants to make videos that show the process of figuring out how to survive after AGI, and I added how founders abroad build a fan base first by posting their making-of process bit by bit, before the product even exists.

My friend in the US recommended Range to me, a book arguing that people who know a range of fields end up succeeding over experts who dug deep into just one, and said it seemed like a book I needed, since I stay close to people from so many fields. When I'm stuck inside my own industry, ideas don't come easily, but when I look at another industry and see mine reflected in it, it sometimes comes into focus like a mirror.

Connecting the people already living in 2030 with those who still feel it's a story from the moon starts, I believe, with sitting the two at the same table and letting them hear each other out. So I keep meeting people. As I told my startup friend that evening, having coffee chats with people is my content, and it's the force that grows the community.

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