First, as I have mentioned, the copy I have is heavily annotated by a previous owner, who expresses interesting thoughts in the margins; just the kinds of thoughts you'd expect to read from a heavy annotator of a book on artificial intelligence, viz:
Yeah, that's borderline I guess. I'm not sure *I* believe in love at first sight, but it's got to start somewhere.
Other comments, though . . .
Further along, Lee discusses a cancer diagnosis which conveniently inspires him to slow down and want to spend more time with his wife and children. He starts that out by helping a friend develop an app meant to help the elderly order food, make appointments, etc., which includes a feature that offered customer support to those unfamiliar with the concepts. They discovered that the customer service portion was the most popular, as the elderly just wanted someone to talk to.
Lee goes on to say the following:
Whether on business trips or vacations, I travel with my wife. I spend more time at home taking care of my mother and try to keep my weekends free to see old friends.
I've apologized and tried to mend friendships with those that I have hurt or neglected in the past. I meet with many young people who reach out to me, no longer communicating only through impersonal blasts across my social media accounts. I try to avoid prioritizing these meetings by who "shows potential," doing my best to engage with all people equally, regardless of their status or talents.
So a born-again venture capitalist. Bravo.
The margin writer, however, says this:
(It's hard to see, but he/she underlines the parts about using the weekends to visit friends and spending time with people who don't show promise or of lowly status or talent and notes: Do I believe this?)
These are our business and thought leaders, folks. This is the world that's coming. Because ew, family and friends. Why waste time with that when there's money to be made?
Lee believes this of AI: "I believe there is a path toward a future of both economic prosperity and spiritual flourishing. Navigating that path will be tricky but if we are able to unite behind this common goal, I believe humans will not just survive in the age of AI. We will thrive like never before."
A tenet of this thriving? Universal basic income. Paid by, well, he doesn't really say. But someone will surely want to pay it, because as we see now the benevolence of billionaires out there is always showing free money on the masses.
How are we gonna get there? By following bold, vague experiments that Lee doesn't cite, but sound like this:
Recognition of the scale of these disruptions has led people like Google cofounder Larry Page to advocate a more radical proposition: let's move to a four-day work week or have multiple people "share" the same job. In one version of this proposal, a single full-time job could be split into several part-time jobs, sharing the increasing scarce resource of jobs across a larger pool of workers. These approaches would likely mean reduced take-home pay for most workers, but these changes could at least help people avoid outright employment.
That's right, folks, AI will introduce the Golden Age of EVERYONE having gig-economy jobs and side hustles, with more people having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet because, hey, that's better than no job at all, right? Right? Meanwhile, the inventors and venture capitalists and masseurs will reside in the part of the economy unaffected by AI and can thus reap the benefits of less-than-full-time work because by golly they're out there creating AI that took the jobs away from the poors so they have to job-pool and earn less money, but hey, they'll only have to work four days a week to fall further behind.
Believe me, I can't wait.
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