Meanwhile, people are quietly poking around figuring out the boundaries of what the technology really can do and pushing it a little further along.

With the A.I. hype I've been keeping my message pretty consistent for all of the people who work for me: "There's a lot of promise, and there are likely a lot of changes that could come if things keep going the way they are with A.I., but even if the technology hits a wall right now that stops it from advancing things have already changed and it's important to embrace where we are and adapt".

I think more people would benefit from forming Super PACs and using that as leverage in pushing political change with parties.

One thing that seems worth think through more is whether the stated outcomes of those agencies is what's actually be optimized for, or whether those are suborned for personal gain by a few parties.

I mostly agree with the article that insurance is grounded in statistical measures of risk and there's no point railing against it. Norms are going to have to adapt to increased risk and how we build homes and infrastructure needs to shift away from short-term, low-cost thinking to longer-term solutions with a higher-upfront cost and lower TCO given the new constraints. Things like burying power lines, aggressively managing fire danger, and homes that are built to be more sound to natural disasters have to become the status quo.

Most of these things are already possible today. In my neighborhood, PG&E did an assessment and it would cost every homeowner on the street ~$25,000 to have the power lines buried. I would have opened my wallet immediately to reduce the fire risk, but it got caught up in politics and policy. When we had some renovation on our house, my wife and I insisted on some of the work being done in ways that would make the house safer and easier to maintain over the long work. The contractor balked at first saying it would cost us an extra couple of thousand dollars. I had to point out that an extra $3000 to make sure things lasted an extra 5 - 10 years and was easier to maintain and upgrade meant nothing. But people have to insist on doing better because right now the norm is to cut corners on everything to save in many cases a negligible amount of money over the life of the work or against the cost if there is a disaster.

My next step is to ask it to rewrite the iOS app into an Android app when I have a block of time to sit down and work through it.

How would real estate developers feel if construction companies / subcontractors had a similar product for pricing their labor? Or how would any company feel if employees worked together to set the price of their labor? That sounds kind of familiar, and doesn't sound like something most companies would be happy about.

It's not a great situation.