My moonshot
Back to deven.cloudWe can't feel a curve until it has already happened to us.
Give a billion people an instrument that makes what's coming feel real, so they meet it as authors instead of victims.
The gap
The people building AI are racing. Everyone else is being briefed.
Most help for the people on the receiving end of AI arrives as a keynote, a briefing, or a course. Those explain the change. They rarely let anyone feel it.
We perceive in straight lines, and this change compounds. The distance between the two is where people lose ground, and where they get taken advantage of.
By instrument I mean a small interactive experience that turns a large idea into something you can hold up against your own life.
The purpose
Make what's coming feel real.
The shot
One billion people. Each uses an instrument on their own, can say where they stand, and does something they would not otherwise have done.
Feel the gap
Thirty paces. Or past a billion.
Move the slider. Counting is easy. Feeling it is the part that fails, and it is the part an instrument is for.
Linear
10pacesDoubling
1,024unitsThe steps still fit on the page. The value does not. That is the deception.
How it works
People don't feel curves. They feel units.
- 01
A unit beats a chart.
Dollars, hours, a stage of a journey, a letter: the measures people already use for their own lives. A curve on a slide is someone else’s graph.
- 02
Handing beats teaching.
Give someone a unit they can run against their own situation and their judgment does the rest. Explanation alone rarely moves anyone.
- 03
It has to work without me.
An experience that needs a presenter reaches one audience at a time. To reach a billion, it has to work when I am nowhere near it.
How I'll know
When a stranger can check it.
- 01
Alone
They used it without anyone presenting it.
- 02
Located
They can say, in their own words, where they stand.
- 03
Moved
They did one thing they were not going to do.
- 04
Handed on
Someone other than me can share it and get the same result.
Visits don't count toward the billion. Actions do.
What this is not
Four ways to miss it.
Not a slowdown
I want the intelligence built. This is no plea for the builders to wait.
Not a courtesy
Understanding handed out after the terms are set is how people get taken.
Not reassurance
An experience that makes people feel better and leaves their decisions untouched has failed.
Not me, scaled
If the work depends on my being there, it cannot grow.
Where it starts
Seven frequencies are live today.
A frequency is a small public experiment tuned to one question about what's coming. None of them is the moonshot yet. Each one tests whether an experience can do what a good instrument does, with no one there to explain it. Three lead the way.
01
Understanding Exponentials
How fast is fast?
Make a prediction, follow the doublings, and feel the curve in your body.
Feel the curve02
Twelve Crossings
Where am I in my own story?
Two questions place you on the hero’s journey, with prompts for the crossing you are in.
Find your crossing03
The Orthographic Interface
What else could letters do?
Twenty-six characters, treated as the raw material of an interface for meaning.
Explore the alphabetWhat I don't know yet
I know the mechanism. I don't know which experience a billion people will pick up.
The next step is simple to state. Put Understanding Exponentials in front of people I have never met. Watch whether it changes a decision. Keep what helps people locate themselves, drop what only explains, and let others build the next one on the same rule.
I have done this work one audience at a time since 1996. The moonshot is doing it for a billion people, with me out of the way.
This work sits beside the moonshot practice of Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail, founders of Singularity University, the education company built around billion-person goals. Their work races to build what is coming. This one stays with the person who has to meet it.