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I’ve started a new company together with Andrew Stirk. I’m excited to share more about what we’re doing at Reflective Works.
Starting with why we’re doing it...
In 2021 my daughter was born. On the other side of the Atlantic, unknown to me at the time, my now co-founder Andrew had just lost his mother. Life and death have a way of getting you thinking about what matters most.
Becoming a parent is the most ordinary thing in the world, it will happen around 140 million times this year. Yet when it happens to you it is the most extraordinary moment you’ve yet lived. It started for me in a bit of a haze. There’s little time in the beginning for high-order thinking when you’re focused on each moment. As the dust settled, the thinking crept back in: as I’m watching my daughter become a person, what kind of person do I want to be now? How would I navigate a world that, for me, had just flipped on its head while the rest of the world kept dutifully spinning around?
It’s perhaps a coincidence that as I was watching a new mind take shape and re-examining my own, breakthroughs in how we might extend the concept of mind to a computer were occurring. What’s not a coincidence is that when I sought to work through my own thinking, I was open to how computers might help. I’ve been writing software since I was first handed a Microsoft Basic tutorial book. I remember the first time the computer did something that I told it to do: a simple number guessing game that I had fun playing. It blew me away. Ordinary on the scope of what was possible, extraordinary to me. Through my words I made the computer do something that I could enjoy.
My first instinct when I saw AI language models (GPT 3 at the time) was to give them a bunch of things I’d written and see if I could have a conversation with myself guided by things I’d written in the past. At the time voice cloning had also gone through a bunch of breakthroughs. So naturally my instinct was to not only ask GPT 3 to write like me, but to then have the computer speak like me. We’ll leave for another time the subject of the extreme vanity of doing this.
It was around this time that a friend re-introduced Andrew and I. We traded notes about his process of self-discovery as he was unraveling the memories of his mother and my ‘art experiment’ of talking to yourself. We spent the better part of this year prototyping and trying to find a way that could satisfy three goals we internalized as a mantra:
Every interaction is valuable in the moment
Each interaction is especially valuable when you can tap into them in the future
No interaction should demand more than the time you want to spend
It would take four subsequent prototypes, including a prototype that itself was used to rapidly build other prototypes, to arrive at what feels like the new beginning. We’ve just begun testing the result of a year of study and, while very early, we think we’ve cracked the mantra.
The more we’ve used what we’re building, the more confident we’ve felt to take leaps, extend kindness, and treasure the moments we spend with the important people in our lives. In short, the more we’ve worked with this machine over the course of this year, the more human we’ve felt. We believe that every person is unique, but that none of us is alone in the human experience. We lead ordinary lives on a global scale, but our time on Earth is extraordinary to each of us and the people we care for.
Inspired by the feedback from our testers we’ve started a company focused on how we might deliver this experience and others like it to as many people as possible. We’re calling it Reflective Works, nodding to the vital role knowledge of self plays in helping us progress towards the lives we want.
Reflective Works is a proudly liberal arts company that designs technology in service of helping humans be human. When you look back, the aim of computing was always to augment human ingenuity, creativity, and craft. As of late, it has started to feel like things have drifted from that original purpose. We believe the recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence present a choice: we can either accelerate down the path the human ↔ computer relationship has been headed on, or we can return to the original purpose and build technology that values and prioritizes putting people in the driver's seat of their own lives. We choose the latter path.
One of the defining characteristics of being human is our ability to create new tools that extend our capabilities. The computer was once introduced as the “bicycle for the mind” and we think language models open a new door between computer and human mind that has every opportunity to be as profound.
For the first time a computer can work in the very same language each of us uses to examine our thoughts, work out what we think, and express ourselves. That opens up a space for nuance, contradiction, and uniqueness that we feel has been missing in our experience of and the discourse around technology as of late. We’re humbled by these new opportunities. We’re also aware, having seen it firsthand over our careers, of the new challenges of any technological change. Guided by our experiences, we believe we have something to offer.
We can’t wait to share what we’ve built with you in the new year and will have more to say on it in the coming weeks. We’d love to hear from you if you’re similarly interested. If you’d like to chat, drop us a line at us@reflectiveworks.co.
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Intro to use for social media posts
I’ve started a new company together with @Andrew. I’m excited to share more about what we’re doing, and I’d love to start today by sharing my why.
In 2021 my daughter was born. On the other side of the Atlantic, unknown to me at the time, my now co-founder Andrew had just lost his mother. Life and death have a way of getting you thinking about what matters most.
Becoming a parent is the most ordinary thing in the world, it will happen around 140 million times this year. Yet when it happens to you it is the most extraordinary moment you’ve yet lived. It started for me in a bit of a haze. There’s little time in the beginning for high-order thinking when you’re focused on each moment. As the dust settled, the thinking crept back in: as I’m watching my daughter become a person, what kind of person do I want to be now? What had I lost in everything I’d gained? How would I navigate a world that, for me, had just flipped on its head while the rest of the world kept dutifully spinning around?
It’s perhaps a coincidence that as I was examining my mind and watching a new one take shape that years of exploring how we might extend the concept of mind to a computer were unlocking breakthroughs in language. What’s not a coincidence is that when I sought to work through my own thinking I was open to how computers might help. I’ve been writing software since I was first handed a Microsoft Basic tutorial book. I remember the first time the computer did something that I told it to do: a simple number guessing game that I had fun playing. It blew me away. Ordinary on the scope of what was possible, extraordinary to me. Through my words I made the computer do something that I could enjoy.
My first instinct when I saw AI language models (GPT 3 at the time) was to give them a bunch of things I’d written and see if I could have a conversation with myself guided by things I’d written in the past. At the time voice cloning had also gone through a bunch of breakthroughs. So naturally my instinct was to not only ask GPT 3 to write like me, but to then have the computer speak like me. We’ll leave for another time the subject of the extreme vanity of doing this. The results were…odd. Sometimes it could get pretty close to what I’d imagine I’d say and other times it would be way off. I had expected that it would be interesting to hear myself when it sounded like me, but the reverse ended up being true. Whenever it was right it felt average; but when it was wrong it immediately activated the part of my inner voice that filled in why it was wrong. It turned out that being wrong was the right way to activate my own mind. Setting aside if the computer is intelligent or not, I left feeling more sure about who I was and more curious and that felt worthy of something.
It was around this time that a friend re-introduced Andrew and I. We traded notes about his process of self-discovery as he was unraveling the memories of his mother and my ‘art experiment’ of talking to yourself. In the earliest meeting we left with not much more than a sense that it would be interesting to keep talking. I left DoorDash at the end of 2022 sufficiently inspired by what might be here that I felt it worthwhile to dedicate time to, though I was unsure of the outcome. A thing called ChatGPT had recently come out and suddenly I wasn’t among the only people I knew that had played with these new tools.
Progress was fast but slow. The first prototype was simple: a diary you could talk to outloud that would perfectly transcribe you, follow-up, and that you could talk back to. I loved it, Andrew loved it too. The more it asked, the more we answered. The questions were like my early experiences: some of them were bad but in being bad they were really good at getting us to look at something through a totally new perspective.
All I had to do was fill it with a range of thoughts every day and then I could start to turn the experience around and ask it about me. I found myself asking questions like ‘what might I be missing?’, ‘what is going better than I realize?’ and ‘where am I not being kind to the people I care about?’. The questions were the sort of ordinary ones anyone might ask about their life, but the wisdom of seeing my own words played back to me was extraordinary.
There was just one problem: no one else liked it. Not enough to stick around beyond the first few questions or days. Getting to the “good part” meant forming and keeping to a rigorous diarying habit and meant being open and willing to discuss intimate details of different facets of your life daily on the promise that it would “be great” someday. Having made careers of growing new technology products, Andrew and I had the humility to know that this kind of a sell was a dead-end.
Yet we still had the experience that we had. And, we knew from our own experience, the experience of friends, and more broadly from the growth of coaching and personal development that these kinds of tools are extremely powerful for helping you live the life you want and make progress.
We did what anyone would do next: we pivoted. A lot. We spent the better part of this year trying to find a way that could satisfy three goals we internalized as a mantra:
#1: Every interaction is valuable in the moment
#2: Each interaction is especially valuable when you can tap into them in the future
#3: No interaction should demand more than the time you want to spend
It would take four subsequent prototypes, including a prototype that itself was used to rapidly build other prototypes, to arrive at what feels like the new beginning. We’ve just begun testing the result of a year of study and, while very early, we think we’ve cracked the mantra.
The more we’ve used what we’re building, the more confident we’ve felt to take leaps, extend kindness, and treasure the moments we spend with the important people in our lives.
In short, the more we’ve worked with this machine over the course of this year, the more human we’ve felt.
We believe that every person is unique, but that none of us is alone in the human experience. We lead ordinary lives on a global scale, but our time on Earth is extraordinary to each of us and the people we care for.
Inspired by the feedback from our testers and this belief in the power of people when enabled by powerful machines, we’ve started a company focused on how we might deliver this experience and others like it to as many people as possible. We’re calling it Reflective Works, nodding to the vital role knowledge of self plays in helping us progress towards the lives we want.
Reflective Works is a proudly liberal arts company that designs technology in service of helping humans be human.
When you look back, the aim of computing was always to augment human ingenuity, creativity, and craft. As of late, it has started to feel like things have drifted from that original purpose. We believe the recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence present a choice: we can either accelerate down the path the human <> computer relationship has been headed on, or we can return to the original purpose and build technology that values and prioritizes putting people in the driver's seat of their own lives. We choose the latter path.
One of the defining characteristics of being human is our ability to create new tools that extend our capabilities. The computer was once introduced as the “bicycle for the mind” and we think language models open a new door between computer and human mind that has every opportunity to be as profound.
For the first time a computer can work in the very same language each of us uses to examine our thoughts, work out what we think, and express ourselves. That opens up a space for nuance, contradiction, and uniqueness that we feel has been missing in our experience of and the discourse around technology as of late. We’re humbled by these new opportunities. We’re also aware, having seen it firsthand over our careers, of the new challenges of any technological change. Guided by our experiences, we believe we have something to offer.
We can’t wait to share what we’ve built with you in the new year and will have more to say on it in the coming weeks. We’d love to hear from you if you’re similarly interested. If you’d like to chat, reach out at reflectiveworks.co
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