Reflecting on Purpose

Why am I, aged 78 and with only a few years of good brain function ahead of me, spending so much time on AI? It interests me greatly, and I get a great deal of pleasure from the intellectual challenge of keeping abreast of its development and how we can use it. But what is the value in that beyond my personal satisfaction?

When Dennis and I started Anapoly AI Labs and persuaded Ray to join us, we saw it as a club for like-minded people to learn how they could apply AI to their individual interests. That idea grew into a potential business opportunity: to help micro-enterprises or freelancers apply AI in their daily work. The pace of AI development has meant that we have been on a constant learning curve, though, making it difficult pursue that opportunity. In any case, we have not found (nor have we seriously looked for) any younger person to join us and pick up the venture as we bow out. Where does that leave us?

A few months ago, I experimented with Claude Code and then adopted it as my AI-of-choice to become part of my personal workspace, alongside Obsidian. I call this toolkit "ThinkSpace". It is a powerful aid for any kind of knowledge work, and its potential capabilities are growing by the week. In principle, ThinkSpace could be made into a suite of context-specific toolkits, the contexts being different types of micro-enterprise, freelance knowledge-worker, or knowledge-based hobbyist. Drop the toolkit into a particular context with a generic set of capabilities already functioning, and then tailor it to the specifics of day-to-day work. But I am an innovator, not an entrepreneur: my interest is in working with new ideas rather than in making a business out of them. So what is my purpose?

A possibility is to focus on building something that will be of value to my grandchildren. The contexts for this would be secondary education, university studies, and early career. A core principle would be to configure the AI's behaviour so that it supported learning (cognitive development) to the fullest extent and protected against cognitive offloading. The detailed implementation of that principle would probably change as the young person moved from one context to the next.

Toolkits of value to my grandchildren would also have wider value, of course, so the business opportunity remains open. So, too, does the possibility of a collaboration with Marjon, one of the early routes Anapoly AI Labs explored.

Carlo Iacono has written a thoughtful piece which resonates with this.