There is a school of thought that believes humans were brought into this universe to create. To live and struggle and love and sin and pay all of the costs required to create new things. The reason we are here, this belief, is precisely to experience the limitations and frictions that God cannot. We are here to pay the cost.
There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.
because when you grow up with emotionally immature or dysregulated parents, love becomes conditional on your usefulness. and so you do exactly that, you become useful, become good. you learn to co-regulate people who never learned to regulate themselves. and in doing so, you start abandoning yourself without even realising it.
Levin, along with Léo Pio-Lopez and Benedikt Hartl, released a paper with a computational model of multicellular morphogenesis using Neural Cellular Automata evolved to form and maintain a target body plan. In their framework, aging appears naturally after developmental goals are met, even without external noise or programmed decay.
If we automate everything away, somebody still needs to make decisions about what we’re doing. In the end, when labor compresses, more of the job is judgment from the top of the pyramid.
But a16z is doing something different, bigger, less... understated. It doesn’t feel like venture capital is supposed to, in part, I think, because I don’t think a16z cares if it’s doing “venture capital.” It just wants to BUILD the future and eat the world.
I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This can be large or small: a lecture series, a business, a blog, a house, a child, etc.