Jake LaCaze Jake LaCaze

I can’t help associating Mother’s Day with another holiday: Thanksgiving. That’s because, in 2011, my mother passed away on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the last holiday I spent with her.

I owe my mother far more than I can ever properly credit. For 10 years in my early childhood, she raised me as a single mother. When she passed away, my mother had worked at a garment factory in southeast Arkansas for 23 years. Her peak wage was $10 an hour.
Thanks to the sacrifices of my mother (and my stepfather), I’ve never made as little as $10 an hour since I graduated college.

As a tired single mother, she prepared me for the future the best way she knew how. She made sure I understood early on that education was my key to getting out of the hometown I couldn’t wait to leave behind. She taught me how to study for tests. She made sure I went to school every day unless I was sick. I didn’t need a prestigious education. (Louisiana public schools have served me just fine.) I just needed an education. And she gave me the stability I needed to focus on being just one tier above mediocre so that I could take on the opportunities waiting for me outside of northeast Louisiana.

I shouldn’t be here, where I am, a humble boy from Middle of Nowhere, Louisiana, making a good life in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for my mother. She is still the rock upon which I stand.

I was 26 years old when my mother passed away. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Even in my mid-20s, I still needed my mommy. And I still do, as I approach middle age.

I often wonder if my mother would be proud of me and where I am. Sometimes, I want nothing more than to hear that sentiment from her. That will never happen. So all I can do is hope.

If you know you owe any semblance of success to your mother–and you know you can never put that fact into proper words–just try. Make the effort. You won’t find the right words. But that’s not the point. The point is in letting her know what you know you can never articulate.

These days, some women lament the idea of being nothing more than just a mother. But there is no such thing as just a mother. A mother brings you into the world. And she is most often the first person to ever love you. We should not discount this simple gift of biology.

So even if your mother is just a mother, let her know you appreciate her. And celebrate the hell out of her while you still can.

Jake LaCaze wants you to say hi to your mother for him.


Songspiration






‘Green Eyes’ by Coldplay

Would we need therapy if we knew how to slow down and unplug? How to stop distracting ourselves from ourselves?

Convenience has robbed us of these opportunities. As certain tasks have gotten easier, we can now more quickly move to something else. We can more easily switch contexts in the name of productivity.

But is productivity always the goal? Maybe if you’re a widgetmaker. But any widgetmaker who stumbled upon this post has likely clicked on to something else.

What do you do when you’ve been productive enough? Pushing alone can take you only so far.

At some point, you need something else to take you to the next level. A fresh insight. A dash of creativity. Brute force can’t be the only option in your toolbelt.

Insight and creativity aren’t easy to measure, like widgets produced. But insight and creativity are every bit as crucial as pure effort for sustained success.

So what do you need to slow down?

Maybe a comfy chair. Place matters.

What about time?

Sure, time can be hard to find, but it’s more doable if you’ve cut out doomscrolling and those streaming services that are becoming more and more like cable television, the very thing you sought to avoid when you cut the cord.

What if the thing you need to do to improve your life is nothing?

Could you do it?

Could you find the space?

Could you find the time?

If you can’t, fine.

But if you can . . .

Today’s target for artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be artificial general intelligence (AGI), a technology that is competent in many areas, like humans. AI is most often highly-specialized, focusing on one area with a narrow set of tasks. This sort of AI is best-suited for specialized audiences needing specialized tasks. But with AGI, the prophets of AI can achieve their dream: AI for everyone, everywhere.

Or so the prophecy claims.

We very well may achieve AGI, but I’m skeptical we’ll get there in the next decade (which, compared to the estimates from the prophets of AI, is an eternity). The simple truth is that we still know so little about how the human brain works. Regardless of how some may feel about humans, our brains are complex machines, calculating far more than given credit.

The developers of AGI seem hellbent on replicating and/or replacing humans. But can you replicate or replace what you don’t fully understand? Supplementing and improving upon human intelligence seems a far better goal. This is why I prefer the concept of augmented intelligence over AGI1.

Anyone familiar with SMART goals knows that goals should be attainable—that’s the ‘A’ in ‘SMART’, after all. And I’m not convinced that replicating or replacing human thought and processing will be attainable in the near future.

If Gary Marcus is right—if the hype seems to be dying and the return on investment just isn’t there2—then it feels as if AGI will be attainable much, much later than the prophets of AI would have us believe.


Jake LaCaze still believes in the potential of humans.






AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It from Harvard Business Review ↩︎



The ROI on GenAI might not be so great, after all by Gary MarcusTranscript ↩︎

Some people want to be left alone to do their own work and go home and call it a day. There’s nothing wrong with that—I support your right to curate your own experience. But by working in such fashion, there’s only so much you can do.

There are only so many hours in a day, you have only so much energy, there are only so many tasks you can give your attention to.

At some point, you as an individual hit a wall. You’ve largely gotten as good as you’re going to get. Any improvements will likely be incremental and lower in impact than previous improvements.

If you find yourself in this position, maybe it’s time to start looking beyond yourself. Maybe it’s time to see if you can help others within your team—however you define that term—improve in the areas that hold them back.

Maybe it’s time to mentor. To scale your impact and elevate those around you.

Maybe it’s time to lead.


Jake LaCaze sometimes likes to change things up with shorter essays.


Transcript

I could try to tell you what exactly Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires 1 is about via a traditional book review, or I could hope that an inspired rant might give you a better idea. If you haven’t already figured it out, I’m choosing the latter route.

The tech billionaires have one simple goal: to shelter themselves from the world they’ve shaped with their outsized wealth, power, and influence. Undoing all they’ve done in the name of making true positive change via small incremental improvements that risk going unrecognised is beyond them. Simply having the option to escape this world via one avenue or another shows that the tech billionaires already live in a reality far different from the one most of us inhabit.

How many ways can one hope to escape?
Rushkoff starts by describing the struggles of those tech billionaires outfitting their doomsday bunkers for the coming apocalypse2. A lot of thought goes into such preparation. Location, supplies, air filtration. The tech billionaires are also looking into how to motivate their security to protect them when the markets collapse and currency is worthless.

Others hope to one day leave the earth behind. They plan to colonize Mars and start over new, where they’ll stand to gain even more as the early adopters of a fresh society.

But what about those tech billionaires who can’t escape in these ways? What if they have no choice but to stay on this boring earth, and what if everything doesn’t go to absolute hell and they can’t justify running away to their bunkers in Hawaii or New Zealand?

That’s where digital escapes like the Metaverse come into play. Who needs Mars or a doomsday bunker when they can build a digital world to replace the physical. You can always buy digital real estate and rent it out to supplement any losses realised from your real estate in the unplugged world3. Some might call this strategy ‘diversification.’

One foot out the door
Can you be tied to the world around you if your mind is set on escaping? Are you invested in the slightest? If the answer is no, then why do we let these select few build a world we’ll be stuck with when they flee the first chance they get? If you already have one foot out the door because you’re convinced that to stay is hopeless, then at what point is reality a foreign concept? And if you’re so sure that a certain outcome is inevitable, when does everything begin to look like a prophecy? And when do you decide that resistance is futile? You might as well get what you can while you can. Just make sure you get enough to help you get away at a later date.

Perhaps we can’t blame the tech billionaires for looking forward to their own big exit, when their investors expect their own such exit, usually in the form of an IPO or flipping the company at some multiple of their original investment.

Many in tech have long adopted Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra to ‘Move fast and break things.’4 But tech’s secondary mantra appears inspired by Matthew Good5:


We’ll stick to the plan:

The fall of man


The tech billionaires aren’t worried though, because as man falls, they will rise, whether to Mars, the Metaverse, or to the safety of their underground bunkers.

No big deal though. I’m sure they’ll wave bye and give a heartfelt thanks for all we’ve done to enable them to get the hell out of Dodge as they leave us to our fates6.


Jake LaCaze really doesn’t like being so sour about tech. But he’s finding it hard not to be.








Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires


on Bookshop.org (Affiliate link) ↩︎



‘Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a private apocalypse bunker in Hawaii?’ on The Guardian ↩︎



‘Inside the lucrative business of a metaverse landlord, where monthly rent can hit $60,000 per property’ on Fast Company ↩︎



‘The problem with “Move fast and break things”—