Dear friends,
Happy Thanksgiving! In the United States, this is a week when many reflect on their blessings and give thanks. Even as I reflect on how lucky I am to have food, shelter, family, and friends, I think about those who have much less and what we can do to help them.
Last week, I spoke with a woman who had been severely physically abused by her husband. She showed me pictures of her face from a few years ago, which had a bloodied sequence of tears down the middle. She also showed me scars left by cigarette burns inflicted by her husband, who told her these burns made her ugly so no other man would ever want her. She is no longer with her husband but continues to struggle. Her phone is badly cracked and barely holds a charge. Without a high-school degree, she has struggled to find a job and is surviving by staying on the couch of a friend. As winter approaches, they keep their place chilly to save the cost of electricity.
Working in AI, I am fortunate to interact with many of the smartest and most capable technology and business leaders in the world. But both at home and when I travel, I try to meet with people of a broad range of backgrounds, because ultimately I want to do work that helps people broadly, and this requires that I understand people broadly. When you go to a grocery store and see someone put down a $5 carton of eggs because it is too expensive, and hear them think through how to explain to their kids why they’re skipping eggs that week, it gives you a deeper appreciation for why a $1.50/hour raise can be life-changing for many people.
While I can try to help out individuals here and there, technology is advancing rapidly, and this gives me a lot of optimism for the future. Technology remains the best way I know of to help people at scale through providing better education, career guidance, healthcare, personal safety, healthier food, or other things needed to support thriving.
I am optimistic about the future because I see so many ways life can be so much better for so many people. I feel blessed that, when my kids or I are cold, we have warm clothing, and when we are hungry, we have a working car to drive to the grocery and buy fresh food. I feel blessed that, rather than using a badly cracked cellphone, I have a modern laptop and a fast internet connection to do my work on.
As a child, my father taught me the aphorism “there but for the grace of God go I” to recognize that, in even slightly different circumstances, I might have ended up with much less. Having worked on many software products, I know that, to make good decisions, I have to understand the people I hope to serve. This is why I continue to routinely seek out, speak with, and try to understand people from all walks of life, and I hope many others in AI will do so, too.
I see so many people in the AI community building things to make the world better. I am thankful for what the AI community has already done, and I look forward to continuing to build and serve others together.
Keep building!
Andrew