Watching machines think

Sometimes, as you approach certain junctions in San Francisco, you can feel the Waymo pause just for a second and think.

There’s something deeply unsettling about it, especially for those of us that prefer to sit in the front seat, because it mimics the human double take so much.

Everything new starts like a toy is one of my favourite startup maxims.

Gaby Woods wrote Living Dolls over twenty years ago; a compelling history of the quest for mechanical life in the Age of Enlightenment.

This was a time of incredible acceleration and mechanical invention and so often the earliest robots that dazzled — the ones that drove their creators to obsession and made onlookers throw their lives away and follow toys on tours across Europe — looked like humans.

Thomas Edison spent years and 100+ patents trying to build a talking doll.

Wolfgang van Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk was a chess playing automaton.

You played chess with “the Turk”, a life size wooden automaton, whose moves were controlled by the cogs and wheels of clockwork machinery concealed inside the cabinet beneath.

The machine toured across Europe for years and, whether it won or lost, it blew people’s minds.

Looking at the image of the trick — because in reality the cabinet concealed a man with a set of mirrors to enable the moves to be done from beneath — the word that comes to mind is “wrapper”.

In June 2025, “just a chatGPT/Claude/[insert model of choice] wrapper” is still considered a reasonable way to dismiss a product or tool.

You could argue the wrapper itself deeply matters — that the wrapper guides the interaction.

You could argue that everything is a wrapper; all software; that bodies are wrappers for consciousness.

None are wholly untrue.

“Wrapper” as a phrase just holds very lightly the magic of creation — whether product or person.

And that’s directionally wrong; I can’t remember a time when I felt so awestruck on the daily with where where technology is.

And yet…

For years, I had jobs that acted as an excuse to meet interesting people.

This year, through Common Magic, I’ve met on average twenty founders a week. Over the year, that’s almost a thousand.

Add to that people you meet at events, out & about, co-investors, team members, LPs now and future.

A thirty-minute Zoom call isn’t the perfect wrapper for any first interaction but in that several thousand each year, there’s only a few people I really connect with (I’m fussy but I don’t think that hit rate is too uncommon).

Typically, these end up being the founders I invest in or those I like to work with most closely, the kind of match where we can easily have a 4–7 hour chat that sets my brain on fire (conversation is the best kind of drug).

Often, those 4–7 hour conversations are walking through what they’re building, and how deeply exciting + uncanny the sheer progress of now is.

As I watch agents turn over how to build me a custom tool, do market research, assess the tone of an email, plan my holiday, I wonder how my fascination with watching a non-human brain come to be affects how fascinating I find other people.

My son is six. Every parent thinks this of their child, but he’s singular.

He just learnt the word “cacophony”. He loves to dance.

When he’s older, will we have so much AI abundance that it all seems boring — and he won’t watch machines think the way I do?

Clearly artificial workers, friends and partners are here to stay. Instead of helping him through a friend dust-up or breakup, will I watch him forgo the stops and starts of human connection for a personalised set of agents that are always-on and fully responsive instead?

Spike Jonze’s Her got so much right, not least the allure of a high-waisted trouser.

But something that always struck me is the lack of business model that comes with Samantha running away to join the other AIs and leaving her human owner / subscriber behind.

Can connection be subscribed to?

You could argue subscription is opting in to connecting to new people.

Opting into fascination.

The Mechanical Turk reminds me we’ve always been fascinated with technology; I hope we continue to fascinate and be fascinated with each other.

Maybe agents reduce the busywork and give us time + space to do so even more. If we can just lift our eyes up from the thinking.

Thanks to Alice, Shreman, Daisy + Mies for things we talked about that sparked this.