Alex Wiltschko

The only reality of that...

is a story.

And I think it's incredible that people can choose to believe or disbelieve completely immaterial things, but yet can organize huge numbers of people to do the extraordinary.

And what's very strange to me is we're in this era of LLMs, and I think the magnitude of what we're talking about now is masked by the ability to have a machine create coherent sentences and paragraphs of English language and of other languages.

Yeah.

I have yet to read a story written by one of these machines.

It will happen, I think, right?

I mean, there's no reason to believe it's not possible.

But there's something different between language and a story.

There's a quantum leap between grammatical correctness and something that causes you to dedicate your life to a mission.

And so like somewhere along the line, I received the story of digitizing her sense of smell.

I didn't invent it, right?

Like people have been thinking about this forever, but it completely got me.

I got completely one-shotted by this story.

And now like I live it and breathe it and I'm happy to.

I think that's astounding.

Nobody ever showed me digital smell, but yet I'm working in a tradition that goes back a century or more.

And I never met the people that came up with the story in the first place.

How absolutely extraordinary is it to have a society bound together by such a thing?

It's nothing to do with what we've been talking about, but I'm just astounded by the power of stories sometimes.