The Myth of AI Adoption
My wife works for a frontier AI company. She's an engineer, working 80-hour weeks, deep in the weeds of the most advanced AI tools.
When I look at her screen, it looks like the coding scenes in the movie Swordfish: sophisticated, beyond my understanding, and perhaps entirely science fiction.
I use AI every day. I built an OpenClaw agent a week after OpenClaw was released, track my finances via ChatGPT's banking integrations, and use LLMs to edit (but not write) this newsletter.
I've always been an early adopter, but compared to what my wife does every day – developing and managing hordes of AI agents that code on her behalf – I feel like a luddite.
I experience this contrast in reverse every day because my wife and I train at a classic 1980s boxing gym four days a week. We trade punches with 20-year-olds in our somewhat rural town and most of our sparring partners have never touched an LLM.
That contrast has me considering what I mean by “behind.”
In 1993 famed science fiction writer William Gibson sat down for an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air and said a line that has since become infamous:
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
I’ve begun to think of "AI adoption" as a spectrum. It is worth knowing where you are compared to the people around you, but it is dangerous to calibrate your urgency off your closest peer group or the best in the world.
If you feel behind, compared to whom? And who do you want to emulate?
The Myth of Slack Adoption in 2016
When I opened Robin’s Cafe in 2016, I had a vision for a “digital representation” of our brick-and-mortar coffee shop.
In the first few weeks, with three employees, I announced that we were going to have a digital town square in the form of a cool new tool called Slack.
The first employee pulled out an iPhone so cracked and shattered that you couldn't touch the screen. The second employee pulled out a pink Motorola Razr! The third employee, a millennial in San Francisco in 2016, said that he did not own a phone.
That was a moment that I knew, over the course of building Robin's Cafe, I would have to radically alter my expectations. Just because I was technology-forward did not mean that the people I was employing as baristas would be able to show up in the same way.
Are the people you are building for or selling to at your level, ahead of you, or behind you on the adoption curve?
Does your product or marketing assume too much fluency, or too little?
Where Do You Spend Your Time?
Even as my wife is coding at the frontier of AI technology, we're also renovating our front yard.
Over a year of home ownership, I’ve come to love house projects – no great surprise since I grew up on acreage. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time this summer tending my yard and planting olive trees. I recently used Claude to learn how to replace a light fixture.
Does spending time planting trees mean that I’m falling “behind” or is it more that I’m living in two different epochs on purpose?
If staying fluent means losing touch with things that matter in the real world, or forcing AI into places it isn't needed — my garden, the boxing gym — then the cost of adoption is too high.
The future is here. How you choose to adopt it is up to you.
3 Things I’ve Loved This Week
Quote I Keep Coming Back To
The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. -William Gibson
Books I’ve Loved
I first read these two books when I was studying Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a decade ago. My wife and I have recently started training at a boxing gym several days a week and I decided to revisit the author's work.
A Fighter‘s Heart is the best place to start because it documents his journey through the study of many different martial arts and the cultures and mindsets of each. It reminds me of Barbarian Days, which is a coming-of-age story about surfing.
Most people should not become fighters, but everybody should learn a little bit of fighting.
Article I’m Considering
I was a bit distressed to read this article, but it fits with my experience of nonstick pans for several years.
Now I’ve used Green Pans for years which despite careful tending inevitably lose their nonstick after about six months. I’m left with two options: buy a new one or continue to use a deteriorating pan.
Reading this article I’m struck by the same conclusion as the author that may be the best solution is to forgo nonstick entirely.
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Until next week,
Robin
