Crazy Ideas Beyond AI

An agent contacted all 85 requested buyers on LinkedIn overnight and about ten signed up, so the next idea has to be stranger, like Reflect Orbital.

Share
Crazy Ideas Beyond AI

We woke up and all 85 people we had requested were contacted, precisely. For people we had talked to before, the messages continued the earlier context.

A world where AI does almost everything

We needed to send LinkedIn messages to overseas buyers, so we gave the agent little more than target countries and job titles and told it to go into the sales tool, find the people, and send tailored messages. By morning, all 85 requested people had been contacted, the messages read well, and for prior contacts the thread picked up where it left off. While we slept, about ten of them had even completed free sign-ups.

The same day we had to connect the office printer for the first time, and visiting the website, installing drivers, reading the guide was unbearable. So we threw the entire document at the agent and told it to install and print, and it asked for permission to operate the computer screen directly. Permission granted, it went to the printer site and downloaded what it needed. It needed the model name, and checking the back of the printer felt like too much work, so we took a photo and threw that in too: model unknown, printer looks like this, figure it out, and it did.

The whole thing took about fifteen minutes, during which we were doing other work. Throwing meaningless, annoying chores at an agent and watching them dissolve is genuinely satisfying.

The end of the software productivity business is visible

And right there a question appears: then what is left for us to build? There does not seem to be much opportunity left in AI software productivity, and where a niche remains the market is too small, so grow it slightly and the frontier labs swallow it within weeks or months.

The world changed too fast in two years, and it feels like we need to jump one level up to a crazier idea, with the problem being that we may still be defining problems with pre-AI assumptions. Business is discovering and solving problems people have, and the way we discover and define them may itself be outdated.

A company that lets you order sunlight

In the middle of that conversation we watched a video: someone presses a button on a smartphone, and sunlight shines down in the middle of the night. For night rescues or moments when you urgently need bright light, an 18-meter mirror on a satellite reflects sunlight down, no giant crane, relatively clean. The company is Reflect Orbital; it raised a 20 million dollar Series A in 2025 and plans to launch two test satellites in 2026.

Whether it works is not the point. Saying you will build an AI agent has become boring, and investors probably place little hope in it, while this idea, whose economics we cannot even begin to judge, hooks instantly and makes you want to hear more. How do ideas like this get born?

Practicing breaking assumptions

From the same angle came another idea: a service that makes you feel as if you had a happy memory, not drugs and not a chip in the brain. Considering that hypnotherapy is actually used to treat post-traumatic stress, it is not entirely absurd.

If someone who never lived in the US received the memory of attending school there as a child, would it help them understand that culture? If someone short on confidence received a memory of boldness, would their personality change? Injecting bad memories, or applying this to children, raises obvious ethical problems. But if reality is a composition of past memories, and those memories are already less than fully accurate, the question itself is worth asking.

What matters is not whether this particular idea is feasible, but the practice of pushing thought in this direction. Treat AI not as a technology but as a mindset for breaking assumptions, and the questions change.

Keep reading


Join Bloom

Bloom builds offline rooms where people and technology meet. We run them in Seoul, and now beyond it.

Read more

일론 머스크와 샘 올트먼의 흑백 사진

한국에선 2030년 대담을 나눌 자리가 없다

같은 2030년, 다른 체감 오후에 만난 개발자 친구는 AI와 상관없는 일을 하는 친구들을 만나면 늘 이렇게 말한다고 했다. 2030년쯤 되면 우리는 AI에게 대체되느냐 마느냐가 아니라, AI를 사람으로 볼지 말지를 이야기하고 있을 거야. 개발자 친구는 지금의 AI 논의가 상당히 피상적이라고 봤다. 많은 전문가도 삶이 바빠 시야가 얕고, 최근 AI와 전혀 상관없는

By Bloom
“AI SLOP” 글자와 녹아내리는 캐릭터들이 그려진 일러스트

AI 시대에는 신뢰가 병목이다

AI가 만든 것들에 점점 피로감을 느낀다는 미국에서 막 돌아온 창업자와 점심을 먹었다. 요즘은 스타트업들이 PR 자료를 AI로 대충 만들어 뿌리는 경우가 많아졌는데, 그런 자료는 결국 효과가 형편없을 거라는 이야기였다. 살짝 AI slop 느낌 나는 순간 저 그냥 안 보거든요. 그는 AI가 쓴 티가 나는 글은 신뢰가 확 떨어진다고 했다. 나는

By Bloom