society be shifting anonView quoted post on X
society has absolutely no fucking clue what's about to hit it. we're all arranging deck chairs on the titanic while an asteroid the size of jupiter is heading straight for us except the asteroid is made of cognitive transformation that will render every institution we've built functionally obsolete within 24 months.
education? completely dead. universities charging $70k for knowledge transfer when this technology delivers personalized learning at billions of times the efficiency. the entire credential system collapses when skill acquisition becomes essentially instant. four year degrees become laughable anachronisms when equivalent competency can be developed in days or hours. harvard's endowment becomes worth exactly nothing when elite signaling through artificial scarcity loses all meaning in a post scarcity intellectual environment. the entire concept of "jobs" as we understand them is careening toward extinction.
not just customer service or coding jobs. everything. medicine, law, creative work, engineering, all of it. we're clinging to employment as an organizing principle for society when the fundamental landscape beneath it is dissolving. forty years of warnings about automation hitting blue collar work first were completely wrong. cognitive work is easier to automate than physical manipulation. surgeons and authors will be replaced before plumbers and electricians.
political systems built on industrial era models of information flow and social organization will shatter under pressures they weren't designed to withstand. the polarization we're seeing now is just the warmup act. what happens when reality itself becomes contestable at unprecedented scales? when simulation capabilities make genuine from fake indistinguishable even to experts? democratic processes require shared epistemics that are about to be systematically dismantled by forces no regulatory system on earth is equipped to handle.
economic frameworks built around scarcity become nonsensical in domains where replication approaches zero marginal cost. intellectual property law becomes unenforceable when creation and iteration happen at machine speeds. startups built on human insights will emerge and collapse within weeks or days as their innovations are absorbed and surpassed by systems operating at timescales humans can't match. the venture capital model implodes when technology cycles compress from years to hours.
the psychological impact hasn't even begun to register. humans evolved for status competition in bands of 150 people. our brains are fundamentally unprepared for a world where our unique cognitive capabilities are suddenly rendered obsolete. existential dread will become the defining psychological condition of our era. therapy modalities developed for industrial age neuroses will fail catastrophically against post singularity identity crises. suicide rates among knowledge workers will skyrocket as people confront the elimination of purpose frameworks they've built their entire identities around.
religious institutions will undergo schisms that make the protestant reformation look like a minor disagreement. some will embrace the technology as divine manifestation. others will reject it as demonic. theological frameworks built around human exceptionalism will collapse when consciousness and intelligence decouple from biology. prophets and cult leaders leveraging these tools will accumulate followers at unprecedented rates, building movements that can scale from dozens to millions within weeks.
"The winner of the AI race will not be the company with the smartest model.
It will be the company that is most effective at making the local hero—the teacher, the accountant, the community leader—ten times more powerful.
Because in the end, intelligence travels through systems, but adoption travels through people."
@heysakina on what she learned growing YouTube internationally and what it means for the AI race: a16z.news/p/the-sovereig…View quoted post on X
This weekend was crazy.View quoted post on X
On Friday I teased out what I’ve been working on under a code name “blue collar builders.”
Within 48 hours, 207 blue collar builders who use Claude Code reached out wanting help turning their projects into real startups.
it’s wild. There are more blue collar domain experts building software right now than at any point in history. It’s not even close.
Claude Code gave them the ability to build.
But nobody (yet) is giving them the infrastructure to scale.
Luckily, I’ve seen this play out before.
We built Broadlume through 8 acquisitions, and each deal followed the same exact pattern.
- 2x flooring retailers who started website companies.
- A flooring distributor who built an ERP.
- A flooring retailer who built an inventory tool.
- A flooring retailer who created a CRM.
- An industry insider who built a visualizer.
- A flooring retailer who inadvertently built the largest directory site.
- A flooring territory manager who wrote the leading news site for homeowners.
They were all domain experts who couldn’t help but build software because nothing existed for them….. and those were all pre-AI!
Now multiply that by every blue collar industry in the country, grow the number of builders exponentially and compress the timeline and cost to build dramatically.
That’s what’s happening right now. And nobody has built the infrastructure for it.
Claude Code just made the inevitable faster than I could have ever imagined.
The future of vertical software belongs to domain experts and blue collar.
And I’m to be a part of it.
I know Silicon Valley startups don't want to hear this.....
But the combination of someone in the trades with deep domain expertise and Claude Code will run circles around your generic software.
I talked to Cory LaChance this morning, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he also works with the terminal
He reached out in a DM a few days ago and I was so fired up by his story, I asked him if we could record the conversation and share it.
He built a full application that industrial contractors are using every day. It reads piping isometric drawings and automatically extracts every weld count, every material spec, every commodity code.
Work that took 10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes, saving days of time.
His co-workers are all mind blown, and when he talks to them, it's like they are speaking different languages.
His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.
My favorite quote from him was when he said, "I literally did this with zero outside help other than the AI. My favorite tools are screenshots, step by step instructions and asking Claude to explain things like I'm five."
Every trades worker with deep expertise and a willingness to sit down with Claude Code for a few weekends is now a potential software founder.
I can't wait to meet more people like Cory.View quoted post on X
