AI Doesn't Have To Be This Way feat. Alex Komoroske

This week go deep with Alex Komoroske, CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked.

The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.

Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.

We can’t take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as “the way things are.”

Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!

✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Become a member to support the show and score myriad perks, like our book club: our next call is on Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words this Sunday, Feb 15th!

✨ Become a founding member for access to my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere and the raw recordings of every unreleased episode! (Anyone can chat with my course transcripts in a dedicated Google Notebook here.)

✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant

Referenced & Related

• The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)