The Enchanted Notebook

Author: Packy McCormick (Not Boring) URL: https://www.notboring.co/p/the-enchanted-notebook One-line: The real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist — Ray Kurzweil’s present-tense storytelling as a method of invention, and how AI may become the “enchanted notebook” that reverse-engineers our written dreams into reality.

Key claims

• Writing the future you want makes it more real. Describe the world you want to inhabit, in the present tense, in rich enough detail that it feels like you already live there — then reverse-engineer how you got there.
• Ray Kurzweil’s superpower is believing harder than anyone in exponential curves; his “Law of Accelerating Returns” predictions have held up remarkably well over 21 years.
• The method mirrors Amazon’s Future Press Release (write the launch announcement from the future, start with the customer, set an audacious goal).
• AI may soon turn written specifications into reverse-engineered CAD files, instruction sets, and bottleneck lists — making innovation half storytelling, with AI filling in the enchanted bits.
• Software is likely easier for AI than mechanical engineering (more public code than public CAD); we may be in Michael Dempsey’s “Curiosity Phase” of AI company-building.

Highlights

• the real and growing power of writing down the future you want to see exist.
• “Write any idea in this notebook,” the wizard whispers, “and it will show you how to make it real.”
• Ray Kurzweil wrote one of the first books that got me really interested in technology, The Singularity is Near.
• The whole interview was fascinating – Kurzweil’s brand of hyper-optimistic futurism is catnip to me. His superpower is believing harder than anyone else in the power of exponential curves.
• His 2001 essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns, is worth a read both for the ideas themselves and for how well many of his 21-year-old predictions have held up.
• the key issue that I would tell younger people is to put yourself in the position that what you’re trying to create already exists. And then you’re explaining…
• You paint a world that you would like to exist, you think can exist, and reverse engineer that.
• And then you actually imagine you’re giving a speech about how you created this. Well you’d have to then work backwards about how you created it to make it work.
• And generally when I talk about things that we’re trying to invent, I would use the present tense as if it already exists. Not just to give myself that confidence, but everybody else that’s working on it. We just have to do all of the steps to make it actual.
• The way Kurzweil describes it, innovation is half storytelling. It’s our Enchanted Notebook, just with humans filling in the enchanted bits for now. #Storytelling
• Write a speech, or a story, about the thing you want to create or the future world you want to inhabit. Paint that world in detail so rich, using the present tense, that it feels like you already live there
• Kurzweil’s process is reminiscent of Amazon’s Future Press Release. When teams at Amazon proposed a new product, Jeff Bezos made them write a press release from the perspective of specific time in the future at which the product has been released and goals have been accomplished. Former Amazon exec John Rossman laid out the four rules for future press releases:
  • Rule 1. The goal must be stated at a future point in time at which success has been achieved and realized.
  • Rule 2. Start with the customer.
  • Rule 3. Set an audacious and clear goal.
  • Rule 4. Outline the principles used that led to success.
• Plus, software engineering is likely an easier problem for AI to solve from a text input than mechanical engineering, if only because the amount of public code available to learn on is much larger than the amount of public CADs available, especially for sufficiently advanced designs, and is likely easier for AI to make sense of.
• BUT it seems almost certain that we’ll reach a point in the coming decades at which I’ll be able to write, “Single-person spacecraft capable of launching 500 pounds into orbit and sustaining life for up to six months” or whatever and get back a reverse-engineered CAD file, instruction set, and materials list with prices and suppliers. If the idea isn’t feasible yet, it might return a list of bottlenecks with best-guesses for when they’ll be solved, and all of those bottleneck lists might serve as a smorgasbord for researchers and entrepreneurs looking for big problems to solve.
• Michael Dempsey thinks we’re in the Curiosity Phase, past the Peak of Inflated Expectations and Trough of Disillusionment, exciting enough to lure people in while still being a really difficult spot in which to build an AI-powered company.
• Very few people are great storytellers and great engineers, but AI might be able to help each side get better at the other.

How it connects

• The Meme Economy - Research — a “What I’m Reading” piece feeding The Meme Economy. The present-tense, “paint-the-future” method is the constructive twin of the essay’s Reality Distortion Field thread: storytelling as a tool that builds reality, not just describes it.
• Historical Futurism — Kurzweil’s hyper-optimistic, exponential-curve futurism is the canonical case.
• Storytelling — “innovation is half storytelling”; the Amazon Future Press Release as a writing discipline (cf. Amazon’s six-page narratives in The Storytelling of Investing - Research).
• People/Orgs: Packy McCormick, Ray Kurzweil, Not Boring, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dempsey. Books: The Singularity is Near.