I'll Never Do That
The alpha in a new technology almost never lives in the demo. It lives in a sentence.
The other night I had dinner with a friend who was locked in.
Self-driving is not the future. People love their cars. People love driving. The wheel is freedom. The whole speech. He was earnest about it. He was also exhausting.
Halfway through I asked the only question that mattered.
Have you ever used Full Self-Driving in a Tesla? Have you ever sat in a Waymo?
No.
And that was the whole dinner. You cannot argue someone into a feeling they have never had. It is not their fault. They literally cannot imagine the thing. Their brain is defending a movie they have not watched.
I stopped debating.
Because the alpha in a new technology almost never lives in the demo.
It lives in a sentence.
I'll never do that.
I would never let that happen.
Not for me.
You hear it around self-driving from people who have never sat in the back with nobody up front. The car is status. Driving is ego. I'm a good driver. They're a bad driver. That story is older than the interstate.
Then you take one ride.
Quieter. Smoother. Always in the lines. Aware of everything. No small talk. No weird energy. No driver texting through a yellow light. And yes, no stranger farting in the front seat of your Uber, which has happened to me, and which permanently recalibrated my feelings about "human drivers."
It feels less like a taxi and more like a monorail gliding through a city that finally got out of its own way. You do not notice how much mental effort driving costs until it is gone. The trip ends and you are not tired. That feeling is the whole argument.
In ten or twenty years, most people will not want to drive. The ones who do will sound like people who still keep a horse. Classic. Fun on a Saturday. Not how you get to work.
And yet.
The more interesting "I'll never" right now is the robot in your house.
The greatest returns in the world live where people say I'll never do that, while their behavior is already doing it but no one is aware of it yet. That's what's happening here.
When the form factor has hands and looks vaguely human, the culture flinches. Too weird. Too close. I'll never have one of those walking around my kitchen. I'll never let a robot hold my baby.
Then you ask new parents what they would buy again in a second.
Almost everyone who owned a Snoo says the Snoo. Expensive. Unbelievable. Ten out of ten. It saved us.
The Snoo is an AI that senses a crying baby and rocks that baby back to sleep. It is, in the most literal sense, a robot holding your child.
People just do not call it that. No face. No hands. So the taboo never wakes up.
That's the tell.
Utility changes the form factor overnight. Hands matter because hands are how work gets finished.
In the next 18 months, you are going to be able to talk to AI, show it a picture of how you want your landscaping to look, have it order every plant and bag of soil and piece of edging online, get it all delivered to your driveway, and then tell the robot to go do that. Because the robot has hands, it pulls the weeds for five hours. It lines the beds. It digs the holes. It sets every plant where the picture said. Your yard looks like the photo. You did not kneel in the dirt once.
Same thing inside the house.
Every night while you sleep: dishes done, dishwasher emptied, counters wiped, living room reset, toys and shoes and mail put back where you told it things live the first time. Laundry washed, dried, folded. A neat basket waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
Not a little simpler.
Done.
The minute "done" shows up, nobody cares what it looks like. Every confident "I'll never do that" turns into a purchase order.
A lot of people might hate the future that's coming. Pretty sure Elon's just going to keep lowering the price of cars and let everyone tip their car into the self-driving network until the car basically pays for itself. Then add $100 or $200 a month for an Optimus. Every car shows up at your house with the robot already in it, driving itself home.
Then I take a picture of my garden and tell Grok Bot or Codex or Claude to make it look like an Italian countryside. What flowers should I plant? Where can I order them nearby? Connect it to the robot and it starts gardening.
Once all these new AI systems can connect to the offline world and actually manufacture things, we're going to see things getting built that we never even imagined could be possible.
I was talking with Nikita Bier earlier this week about using Astra, the new ChatGPT model, to make things. It feels like the tip of an iceberg. Here's his post.
For less than my old car payment, I have a self-driving car and a robot doing the yard. I can just spend more time with my family.