Adam Gamwell

We’re experiencing many crises in America right now, but arguably the meta-crisis is one of social trust. 

For decades, there has been a building body of evidence that when people trust each other — including literally responding “yes” to the question “Can most people be trusted?” — lots of important, positive things are easier: income inequality... See more

As we build systems whose capabilities more and more resemble those of humans, despite the fact that those systems work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way humans work, it becomes increasingly tempting to anthropomorphise them. Humans have evolved to co-exist over many millions of years, and human culture has evolved over

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Gathering is, in this way, not the act of aggregation alone. It is not an automated collection or the formal acquisition of works for an institution, nor is it the plundering or extraction of resources from a neighboring region. It is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for... See more

“There can be no experience of the world without the experiencer and that, my dear friends, is us.”

“Before anyone can make theories or get data or have ideas about the world, there must be the raw presence of being-in-the-world. The world doesn’t appear in the abstract to a disembodied perspective floating in space… it appears to us, exactly where... See more

If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like. Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.

By definition, you will likely succeed a vanishingly-small percentage of the time, but—as the saying goes—that’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to venture—fistfuls of money in hand—at the furthest extremes of capitalism, hoping to stumble upon that rare, proper intersection of technology and commerciality.By design, most investments will miss... See more

In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it... See more

Aside from the doomers who believe that AI will kill us all and the techno-utopians who believe it will solve all of our problems, there are three main ways that people seem to be thinking about AI. 

At one extreme, you might fear that AI will take your job. Certainly, you’ve read as much in the press, and it does seem to be getting better and... See more

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.