How AI might shape us

I've been working in tech since 2012, but something ocurred to me recently - I don't really remember the details of my mindset at those earlier stages of my career any longer. I know that I bought the domain meulmeester.ca around that time as a tool to learn. I didn't have any real ideas on products to build but I wanted to get more familiar with deploying things on the internet. In the very beginning I used DigitalOcean paying for a VPS and learned about SSH, Ubuntu, Nginx, and essentially just SFTP'd static HTML files up to the server and served them directly. Eventually, I got more interested in understanding web servers and built a simple Python web server to serve the statis HTML files. I tried Remix at one point when it came out and most recently I've been deploying on Vercel as a NextJS app and have figured out how to render MDX files.

I've never been overly interested in writing a blog, or writing in general. But as I reflect I think it would have been useful to have written down my mindset, what I was interested in, useful learnings I could refer back to, and what I found difficult along the way. Because I think the journey itself was important.

I'd like to try and capture my current state of mind, especially in the context of AI since it seems like it's gearing up to be a big shift in how we work, and potentially live. Though, I don't mean that in likely the same way that I see a lot of hype for AI conveying it. I think a good analogy to draw from is social media. Back in ~2008 when Facebook was really taking off there was a sense that social media would be a tool to enable people to retain connections. It accomplished that goal in a lot of ways in that even as someone who doesn't engage much, I still have the ability to stay in touch with more people and family than I otherwise could. However, in a lot of ways social media has had a tremendous negative impact on society particularly on young adults who need social connection the most.

In a similar way AI is making it easier for people to do all sorts of things, and I worry that for the next generation a side effect is that they may miss out on an important aspect of learning, which is the journey.

I firmly believe that in order to learn and meaningfully effect change in any aspect of your life, whether it be in the context of work or your personal life, requires