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Friends, 

We launched the “Letters to a Young Investor” series in October last year and announced that Season 1 would feature the inimitable Reid Hoffman. Today marks the last edition of our collaboration. It’s definitely bittersweet! I’ve loved learning from Reid and know many of you have, too. These correspondences have given me novel investing frameworks, helped me better separate signal from noise, and provided fresh mental models to consider the future.

With that in mind, I’m excited to share this last conversation. It’s on a heady topic: humanity’s fraught but marvelous future. What should we expect of the next few years and decades? How will AI change our lives? What should we worry about? Reid shares his thoughts below. 

As always, we’re sharing a generous preview with all readers, but to access the full conversation – and many others – become a member of our premium newsletter, Generalist+. For just $22 per month, you’ll unlock unique series like this one and gain exclusive access to strategies and insights that will make you a better investor and thinker. (Thanks to all of you who are members already! You are great.) 

*In case you missed them, here are the first, second, and third correspondences between Reid and me.

Mario’s letter

Subject: A Fraught and Marvelous Future
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Reid Hoffman
Date: Monday, February 5 2024 at 1:01 PM ET

Reid, 

Hello from Brooklyn! I am writing to you from a desk in view of the Manhattan Bridge, provided I crane my neck and squint.

Over the past four months, we’ve covered a range of subjects across the investing and tech landscape: developing a “theory of the game,” the psychology of great founders, and separating “oases” from “mirages” when venture investing. Along the way, we touched on your interactions with the founders of Airbnb, Stripe, DeepMind, and Crisis Text Line, wisdom from colleagues like David Sze, and venture capital as a form of “predictive anthropology.”

Today, I’m excited to turn our attention to the future and AI’s role in it. Though we’ve touched on aspects of this subject, there’s a great deal we’ve yet to cover that I think you’re uniquely equipped to comment on. 

You have capitalized companies across the sector and co-founded two major players in the space: OpenAI and Inflection. Your philosophy background, political engagements, and deep appreciation for the humanities give you an understanding of the players involved and power centers beyond Silicon Valley. You also seem to be learning in real time, actively experimenting with technologies as they’re created, and sharing your observations along the way. I would suggest that few people on Earth combine such a sophisticated understanding of the technology, appreciation for the challenges of building in the space, and a far-reaching sense of its potential effects as you. 

You may remember that we started this correspondence by reflecting on a quote by Otto von Bismarck. (“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”) Above all, we used von Bismarck’s words to discuss the merits of learning from the past. Today, I’d like to use another quote to direct our vision forward. 

Over the years, I’ve been alternatingly captivated and infuriated by the television series Black Mirror. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but I would argue that a good percentage of its episodes succeed in telling compelling stories, satirizing society at large, and presenting plausible technological futures. Favorite episodes include Fifteen Million Merits, The Entire History of You, Be Right Back, and White Christmas. Though I wouldn’t want to overdetermine why these resonate, I think they succeed in surfacing the human and market motivations that might drive us toward the version of the world presented.  

More than any particular episode, though, I find myself returning to the words of Black Mirror’s creator, Charlie Brooker. In introducing his anthology to readers of The Guardian in 2011, Brooker described the show’s goal as portraying “the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” The immediacy of Brooker’s phrasing sticks with me. Often, when I look upon some new technological marvel – some marvelous app or device – I’ll think of it. What inadvertent destination might this little miracle take us to in the next 10 minutes or 10 years? (There’s hardly much difference in the scale of human history.) 

These are Brooker’s words, and I would love to think through them together as they relate to AI specifically and our technological future more broadly. But I’d rather begin by inverting them. Perhaps because I spend most of my days energized by innovation, I can’t help but replace “clumsy” with “graceful” – or at least “lucky.” To paraphrase Inverse-Brooker: how might we be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re lucky?

Although I think I have studied the current AI revolution more closely than the average person, the difference between what one sees at the bleeding edge and a few miles back can be profound. Through your investing, writing, and operating, I’m curious to hear what parts of our lives you expect to be transformed over the next few years – particularly those that the rest of us may be underestimating.

How will the Reid and Mario of 2029 and 2034 go about their days? Which devices and applications will they use? What will they worry about, and what contemporary worries might have been resolved for good? Which companies, technologies, and people will be most influential? What political issues will they face? What new laws will we need? (In a time of holograms and perfectly synthesized personalities, the “Right to Remain Dead” might emerge as an important personal liberty, for example.) How will the contours of society look different – and how might they look the same?

I recognize I am asking you an impossible (but hopefully fun) series of questions that boils down to just two: What might the future look like? And how can we maximize our odds of alighting on the luckiest, most graceful of pathways? 

It seems only fair to acknowledge the actual sentiment of Brooker’s words, too. As he adds in the piece, “If there’s one thing we know about mankind, it’s this: we're usually clumsy.” Given our species’ propensity for bumbling and fumbling, what risks are particularly pronounced over the next decade? What might the world look like if we’re not careful? What actions should we take today to make life better for the denizens of tomorrow? 

It’s at this point that I feel the need to deliver something like a confession. Although I am optimistic about many aspects of the AI revolution, I have sincere, stubborn worries about the potential damage it could cause. In a sector so defined by its optimism, that feels almost sacrilegious. I doubt any of my concerns will be particularly novel to you: I worry about AI’s alignment with humanity’s goals, its potential to hallucinate/err at scale, and how its asymmetric power might magnify the damage done by bad actors. Do you think these are reasonable fears? Which are overblown, and which risks attract too little attention? How can we, as a species, begin to work through this new, thorny set of problems and opportunities? How can each of us, individually, reckon and adapt to the changes we are about to live through?

Learning from and with you over these past four months has been a privilege. I remain in your debt for the candor, thoughtfulness, and generosity you have brought to this correspondence. I will miss it a great deal! (And hope we have reasons to reprise it in one form or another before too long.) 

With gratitude, 

Mario

Reid’s response

Subject: A Fraught and Marvelous Future
From: Reid Hoffman
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Tuesday, February 20 2024 at 11:54 PM ET

Mario,

We’re ending on a great note, as you’ve focused on two topics that I love: [The Best Possible Version of] the Future and AI. :)

I, too, definitely appreciate Black Mirror’s artistry and the sophistication with which Brooker’s team masterfully unrolls the tension in each episode. It’s entertaining and thought-provoking while certainly giving us a vision of what not to steer toward. 

But, by deliberate design, Black Mirror mines for material in the darkest core of humanity’s story. I hadn’t heard those exact quotes from Brooker (thanks for introducing). Upfront, I’ll note that I disagree with Brooker’s assertion that humanity is “usually clumsy.” We are, of course, clumsy frequently. The evidence of that is littered throughout history and incites our present reality. But in the long run, our “Black Mirror” moments are not the enduring part of humanity’s story.

I’ve sometimes said that we need a “White Mirror” to tell the bigger part of our story – namely, how we’ve used technology to go from a species that lived in pitch-black caves (lacking mirrors of any kind) to one that cures diseases, builds 100-story glass skyscrapers, traveled to the moon, and enables hundreds of millions of people around the planet to stream on-demand a dramatic series about the poisons of technology.

I’ve been a huge fan of science fiction since childhood. A big part of my love for it stems from how well it serves as a place to imagine the futures we want to steer towards – not just avoid. 

I think that’s missing in a lot of our discourse around technology in both entertainment industry depictions (Black Mirror, Westworld, Deus Ex Machina) and in the news media and books about technology’s impact on the world. 

I get it, of course. Darkness and fear have always felt most visceral. They exert the strongest gravitational pull on humanity’s attention; they are the lowest-hanging fruit in storytelling.

That’s why I created my podcast Possible, why I wrote Impromptu with the help of ChatGPT. As the tagline of Possible puts out, I want to explore the future in which everything may break humanity’s way. Not as a form of wishful thinking or denialism about the real challenges we face but rather as a way to try to think about the future in a bold, ambitious way. In other words, not just “What do we really need to try to prevent so that things don't get as bad as Black Mirror?” But also, “What are the things we should try to proactively steer toward to create a future that’s actually radically better than our current trajectory?”

Which is not to say Black Mirror doesn’t fulfill a valuable function (it does!) or that it should take a more even-handed approach to the futures it depicts (that’s not its reason for being!). But as I alluded to above, on some level, I think the show actually exists as an ironic counterpoint to its/his own vision.

Thanks to technology – here: Netflix – what began as a show with a tiny budget, broadcast in a regional market (UK), is now a global megahit. (Even in its original incarnation, tech innovation played a big role…social media buzz, quick expansion to foreign markets, etc.) When the show switched to Netflix, budgets got bigger, audience got bigger, the overall lifespan of the show is probably longer than it would have been in a pre-streaming world. ...