I was a piece of article to read today, and I find it…riveting.
Unlike normal articles - dry, boring, full of citations - the message of this one was told through a story.
A very interesting fictional story, which I hope more people would read.
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“It is told through the fictional characters of Caroline Dubois, a French policy worker in Brussels, and Christian Vogt, the German founder of a fast-growing AI company who has just relocated to Silicon Valley. While their personas are made up, the events they experience are grounded in existing trends, and meant to be realistic.”
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If you haven’t read it yet, I will do my best to not give any spoilers.
If you want to read it first before reading my thoughts on it, here’s the link: https://europe2031.ai/
In an nutshell, the story outlines how an entire continent (Europe) hesitated its way into irrelevance.
The protagonist, Caroline, started out as someone from an environment where there were much skepticism around AI.
People around her said that AI is a bubble that will burst anytime, that its all hype, not really here to stay, and the public will learn soon.
To the people around her, AI is bordering on science fiction.
But when she came back from an assignment in California, what she saw shook her.
She wrestled internally - and heavily - with a tension between two ends.
Her sense of duty requires her to try and wake her peers and superiors about the dangers of inaction. Not AI. Inaction.
Her knowledge of how things are in her place of work, her environment, and the very strong possibility of being ridiculed if she did.
While she hesitated, the Americans were racing ahead with China at light speed.
When she realized she couldn’t afford to wait any longer, she started to speak about AI in meetings.
But unlike her, her peers did not have the benefit of seeing for themselves what’s truly possible and what’s happening in the Silicon Valley.
They shrugged it off, moved on to different topics, and went about their days as normal.
She kept trying, but nothing she did made a difference.
By the time Europe wakes up to the potential of AI and committed, it was all too late. They were completely outclassed by the Americans 10-to-1.
It became a situation where nothing they can ever do, will make a difference.
For a time, government subsidies and welfare payouts helped their citizens maintain a semblance of life.
Eventually, they were paying more serving debt interests than their entire national defense budget.
I am very tempted to keep talking about this article, but I won’t spoil it for you any more than I already did.
You should read it.
Towards the end (2031), lets just say that Europe had to make decisions between bad and worst, and accept deals that they never would have taken today.
All talents and wealth were concentrated into two countries: America and China.
Why this happened: The leaders hesitated.
They dismissed the facts in front of them, prioritized other matters, put their heads in the sand.
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‘It is like – it is like – I don’t know. Some oracle shows up at your door and says you have to qualify for the Olympic 200-metre freestyle in three years or the world ends. And you barely work out. You go to the gym maybe once a week. There is no realistic version of this in which you qualify. But the oracle is right. The world really does end if you don’t. So what should you do? You should train. You should train like a god-damn lunatic. You should sleep eight hours a night and eat the right things and stop seeing your friends, because the alternative is the world ending. But you don’t. You don’t train because the water is cold. Because you are really more of a tennis person. Because you decide the coach has a profit motive. You do nothing. You let it happen.
‘That is what we did. We let it happen. We told ourselves it could not be done and we went home and we let it happen. And I am so fucking angry at all of us for that. Because it could have been done. It could have been done. Not certainly. But there was a chance and we did not even try.’
She stops. She finds that she is crying. She has not cried in front of another person for years, not even with her therapist.
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And the reason why this speaks to me, is because of what I see every day.
“Got no time”? Check.
“I am not techy”? Check.
“It’ll pass”? Check.
But this isn’t a time management issue.
It is a refusal to step out of the familiar grind.
It is much more comfortable to do the things we are used to doing - even if the thing we are used to doing is painful and unnecessary.
It is hard to step back, think about where we’re heading, reflect on what we’ve done, and make the hard calls.
To stop moving, sit with the problem, and risk breaking the current routine.
So people choose the comfort of being...exactly the way they are
But reality does not care how busy we are.
There is never a convenient time to build.
And sometimes, the moment it is difficult to do something might the exact time and reason why we have to do it.
Go read the article: https://europe2031.ai/
FELIX
P.S. I am doing a get-together among my NLC users to build stuff together.
I will guide every one on building something small and ship within 4 hours with agents.
Would you be interested to join?