Waiting for Godot
The job of waiters is not the first one I would choose to flourish. Waiting for orders to fulfill is not really my style. Yet somehow we are all waiters in this digital era. We wait for Google to provide search results or for GPT to produce text from prompts. We also wait for reactions on social media. Waiting has replaced wanting. When dealing with scarcity wanting is the basic stance. Waiting is its equivalent in a virtual economy of abundance. The difference between waiting and wanting lies in the fact that there is no guarantee that your wish will be granted (which is said “exaucer” in french very close to exhausted…) when wanting, while there is an expected result expected by default when waiting.
Sesame street
Communication is a two way street. Narcissists of the digital era desire to be seen by others. Even if the street is not symmetrical —viewers and viewed are not acting the same— modern narcissus expect at least attention from others. In which they differ from the original narcissus that is alone in the ancient Greek myth. The ancient admires himself in its reflect on water while the modern waits for likes and retweets.
When things don’t go your way is also a way to differentiate waiting from wanting. When you want you end up happy if the wish is fulfilled, when you wait you are disappointed if nothing comes. Like Batman and the Joker, waiting and wanting are two opposite sides of the same coin. Default expectations are flipped.
Contemplating and complaining
Answers as a service is maybe the most pernicious product of the digital era of abundance. It creates this case law that there is an answer or a solution right there, just a click or a prompt away. The underlying metaphysical presupposition is that we are locked in a closed world: everything that you need, or require, is already here. You just have to search smarter. It translates into those myriads of wrappers startups that are using Chat GPT as their engine to resolve whatever problem they are pretending to address. And it is true that rearranging differently existing services is at the heart of distributed systems. It bears some creativity too. It also makes things so easy that struggling to build becomes a signal that you are doing it wrong. It is like open creativity has been left on the side of the road while only closed creativity —using things already here— is getting all the lights. It is like the constraints have been inverted too.
In a material world constraints are outside of you: it is difficult to get stuff. In a virtual world constraints are inside of you: it is so easy to access services, for instance there is no problem of things being too far away or too hard to use. APIs can be used like lego bricks to build very complex systems. So you start to think that the only limits are the one of your imagination. But this is only type 1 imagination limit. The limit that makes you complain like a spoilt kid.
Type 2 imagination limit
Type 1 imagination is the imagination of what you can do with what is available. But there is another type of imagination: what you could do. Lets call it type 2 imagination. Large progress are result of type 2 imagination. Like Colombus trying to find an alternative way to go to asia, circumventing the always messy Middle East roads… Like Einstein thinking about light speed and strange experimental results: the theoretical tools at hand were not enough. Type 2 imagination is harder because it entails the creation of new ideas. Chat GPT had the merit to make the distinction between those 2 type of imagination clear. If it is a very good generic tool for type 1 imagination, its limits are clearly seen. One of them is the type 2 imagination, other limits come from biases coming from the learning material and the tuning of the model. The Google Gemini example may come to mind.
Type 2 is harder by nature. It includes the acceptance of errors, something that is less and less accepeted in our “for your safety” era. In this it is a bit like entrepreneurs accepting that most of their business adventures are going to fail. But this is the only way to make real progress. It looks like type 2 imagination has stalled since half a century: if you put someone from the 70s into a 2024 home, there is not going to be anything really surprising apart the screens. Washing machines, cooking robots, basic furniture have not visibly changed. The same happens if this person takes a flight. Maybe modern planes are optimized, use less fuel etc. but they don’t go faster (they even go slower because Condorde is not operated anymore). Same story repeats itself in theoretical physics, or biology. We discovered DNA and nucelar power and are jut optimizing on those discoveries. Maybe one exception is the Musk’s adventure: from reusable rockets to neuralink passing by starlink, those enterprises are not just optimizations of earlier versions but they are far from being the rule. What are we waiting for ?