391: AI is Flipping Our Relationship with Technology

Hey. It's Arvid, and welcome to the Bootstrap founder. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my merchant of record payment provider of choice. They're taking care of all the things related to money so founders like you and I can focus on building the things that only we could build, and Paddle handles the rest, payments, recovering money, all that kind of stuff. I highly recommend it, so please check out paddle.com. Last week, I read a tweet by Channing Allen, and he's one of the cofounders of Indie Hackers. The tweet was about the term second brain. He was saying how it was kind of crazy that just a couple of years ago, folks were publishing best selling books on the brilliance of spending hours a day doing manual data entry into spreadsheet, abstract notion, and then calling these brains. Over the last couple of years, I think we've developed completely new technology for this with the whole large language model system. And people like Channing now log no fewer than 1,000 autobiographical words every day into an LLM with long term memory and then that combined with access to the whole Internet becomes a thing that knows him much better than he knows himself. It's not just a second brain, not just a better second brain, he says it's on the way to becoming a better first brain. And that's a fascinating idea and quite the development over a very short time span. And I wanna explore what it means or what it might mean for us as creators, founders, developers, and humans. I think I'm looking at this from the perspective of a technologist. That's always who I've been, but also as someone who's seen their own work transformed by these tools just in the past year. Like things have changed so much, I hardly recognize how I approach writing and coding and all of this, but I'll get to this. Maybe let's have a little excursion into philosophy here in transhumanism, which explores where humanity is headed and how technology shapes our future and our past, I guess. There's something called the body extension theory. Humans are the first animals who really embrace extending their bodies through technology. Like there are animals like crows or whatever that can use tools, but truly extending what the body can do. And I don't necessarily mean hardware tech, like the things that even as software people we use the term for, I mean any tool that extends and strengthens part of the human body. The example that is always given to explain this is that the hammer is a version of the fist, and it's so much more resilient and stronger than a fist could ever be and a saw is a stronger version of human teeth or claws and a microscope extends our eyes, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about, right? We build tools and then extend our body through it. So when I got my …