When Jacob Coxon’s tweet about resigning from Anthropic goes viral, I am holding my three-week-old baby. Instantly, my feed is filled with takes: We must pause the frontier. This is all IPO marketing for Anthropic. A p(doom) of 10 percent is low, actually.
I feel strangely serene. Is it oxytocin or optimism? Maybe it’s just pragmatism; I am unlikely to influence civilization-level outcomes. But my hunch is that the future—my daughter’s future—will be far less extreme, but also far more interesting.
Before the end of humanity discourse, we were talking about the end of work. Information work, specifically. In the tech industry, many of us are coping with the threat of everything becoming automated by automating everything as quickly as possible. This frenzy of agentic productivity hides a desperate wish: that we humans will have something of value to offer on the other side.
The truth is that most people want change to be incremental, not radical. Progress would look like a little less email, fewer meetings or Zooms, and delegating annoying tasks (to human or agent, it matters not). Even as someone betting on disruption for a living, I’m constantly bargaining with our machine gods: You can have coding, but can you leave us (good) writing?
But for my baby, any baby, I’m happy to throw it all away. To conceive of a world with no inbox, no meetings, no professional brand building. To question the very nature and purpose of work in a world where human-like intelligence is abundant and cheap. To dream of how my daughter might spend her precious time if she doesn’t have to monetize it.
A baby has none of our baggage. And when I look at my baby, I can set mine aside.
To imagine the future we want to see, baby is the prompt.
