Guy Reams (00:01.23)
This is day 71. The pressure is on to be more human.
I met a young man in an interview today who suggested that because I was running an AI company, I should be using AI tools to automate more so I could employ fewer humans. I guess this is true, but here is the problem. Using AI simply means the organic growth accelerates. So it is not fewer humans, it is actually more humans. Because as AI helps you gain traction and get through the easy stuff faster, the need expands to have more people in the mix managing, orchestrating, plan,
planting and solving the myriad of problems that your tool sprawl has now created for you. Here's the silver lining, however. People are the catalyst for growth. You will always hire people who cause problems. They will create culture clashes, stir up conflicts, spark office politics, and make demands. Then you will hire people who find new ways to solve challenges, discover new patches of dirt to plant in, and help this organic thing thrive.
Put a bunch of people in the garden together and suddenly your little plot is bursting with bounty in the spring as new growth takes shape. This is the marvel and that is when you realize that you are not really in control anymore. The thing you created is now a living creature all by itself with its own pulse, its own personality, and its own soul. The people you bring in start to force change and that often change could be good and hopefully you are not too stubborn to get in the way.
You created this mess and your weaknesses magnified the problems. Now you get to watch as your organic creature you made starts to heal itself and grow in ways you never thought possible. So never forget, when you bring that young bright-eyed kid into the office for an interview, you may be looking at the next catalyst for positive change. The only way to fix an organic creation such as a startup environment is to introduce new people.
Guy Reams (01:54.776)
The name of our new company, AskTouring.ai, is fitting because I find myself asking the same question that Alan Turing posed in 1950 when he wrote his famous paper on computing, machinery, and intelligence. We may hope that machines will eventually compete with humans in all purely intellectual fields, but what are the best ones to start with? Even this is a difficult decision. Many people think that a very abstract activity like playing chess would be the best.
It can also be maintained that it's best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy and then teach it to understand and speak English. The last sentence of this paper is what struck me the most, though. Even though we can only see a small distance in front of us, the amount of work that needs to be done remains significant. I think that is as in 1950 when Turing wrote his paper as it is now in 2025.
As I've been building and taking this AI engine to market, I've been experimenting with what is possible. The adventure has been crazy, unpredictable, and filled with moments that no algorithm could have anticipated. Just like Turing asked almost a century ago, I am asking, what makes a human uniquely human? As AI advances continue, the open question stands out. What is the human value proposition? I came across the revelation this morning.
Now that AI is taking care of the simple repetitive tasks, the pressure is on for us humans to be precisely more human, meaning to be more creative, to be more unpredictable, to come up with connections that no machine could ever do. Our role in the future seems to be precisely that, more human. Mistakes and beauty all rolled up into one. There will be a time in the not too distant future where we just cannot afford to wait 15,
or 20 years for a young person to learn all the fundamentals before they become productive. We're going to want them to start being productive at a much higher level when they leave the school system. Perhaps it is time to demand more of our young people. They have a human brain that is highly capable, incredibly efficient, especially when they are young. Maybe it's time to force them to actually use it. The only way we are going to produce engineers, scientists, authors, researchers who can break new boundaries is by getting them started younger.
Guy Reams (04:11.414)
and getting them comfortable with using the tools that will rapidly extend and magnify their capabilities. The ship has sailed pretty much. We decided as a society that it was perfectly acceptable to hand our children small digital devices that allowed them to communicate with the entire world. So now we are stupefied that these young people are using modern AI tools to create memes, AI videos, and silly fakes to their friends in compromising situations. We created this monster.
So perhaps instead of trying to slow it down with tactics that are not going to work, we should just exponentially increase the sophistication and quantity of what is required by them. Of course, this will lead to an even wider gap between those who have access to this technology and those who do not. But that is a topic for another day, I suppose. Consider the fact that our imagination of our interactions with others is not only amplified by social media, but also exponentially impacted by artificial intelligence.
Understanding our drive to manage our perceived appearance to others seems more relevant than ever. Do we seek to amplify how we think others perceive us, or do we strive to amplify who we truly are? That is where the human value proposition becomes clear. Machines can process, calculate, and optimize. They can handle the repetitive, the predictable, the algorithmic. But they cannot be messy. They cannot be beautifully flawed. They cannot make the kind of mistakes that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.
They cannot feel the weight of a decision in their gut or trust an intuition that defies logic or create something that surprises even themselves. The future belongs to those who can be more human, not less. Those who can embrace the chaos, the creativity, the unpredictability that makes us who we are. Those who can look at a problem and see not just the solution, but the poetry and the struggle. Those who can connect ideas that have no business being connected and in doing so, create something entirely new. This is what I have learned building an AI company.
The more powerful the machine becomes, the more valuable the human becomes, not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them. Our mistakes are not bugs, they are actually features. Our unpredictability is not a weakness, it is our greatest strength. Our ability to be beautifully messily, gloriously human is the one thing no machine will ever be able to replicate. So when you bring that young bright-eyed kid into the office for an interview, you may be looking at the next catalyst for positive change. Because in a world of perfect algorithms and flawless execution,
Guy Reams (06:29.986)
What we need most are people who can be imperfectly wonderful and undeniably human.