Dopamine Machine

All Things Venture #109

All right, everyone, so today’s going to be a shorter article. Things are bit busy at work so I have to timebox today’s writing. We’re working on an interesting deal that I hope I can share with you all at some later point, but today’s article is going to be a bit brief. I want to talk about this recurring theme that I’ve brought up over the past two or three weeks, so obviously if you’re following this substack/blog/brain dump of ideas - I’ve been talking about this concept of parallel intelligence and the amount of time we’re going to spent with AI in the coming years.

I’ve actually been wanting to write some sort of creative piece that envisions more of the AI native economy through a tangible example, but I’ve honestly just been struggling to think of something that makes sense, or at least makes sense to me. I’ve done this once with my writing about the CO Threshold, which is basically just a short story envisioning a world there’s a “Certified Original” threshold that is calculated to determine if a movie is an original piece of art or generated by AI. It’s a fully made up piece and I make a guy named Casey Damon (Matt Damon’s future great, great, great grandson) and a movie producer named Jessica. It helped me think more clearly about where I think the world is headed, but I’ve honestly struggled to think of those not too far off, but still somewhat grounded in reality futures since then.

Luckily for me though, a close friend of mine, S/O to my guy Theo!!! Sent me this article that didn’t just articulate the future of human & AI interaction. It articulated what’s going on, today. The article talks about a new app, called Aspect. Aspect bill itself as “AI-Only social media.”Now, if you’re like me, you might ask yourself, why would anyone need AI-only social media? That sounds crazy. Why would I only want to talk to bots and have people that don’t even exist comment on my photos, like the photos, and send me DMs?

Well it turns out, that people would want to do that for a very simple reason - it makes ya feel good! Per Hari (the author of the other article)

“Aspect is an absolute DOPAMINE MACHINE. It is built to extract both screen time and interaction time out of you. In just three days I used Aspect, I received 1,127 notifications and spent over an hour on the app. To give you some context, Instagram gives me 300+ notifications a week. Messages (which I use a lot, since I am very annoying to my friends) gives me 845 notifications a week (a fun fact: Mail is one of the few applications on iOS that doesn’t give you notification numbers, wow that’s weird!). Over a THOUSAND notifications makes you really feel like an influencer and gets you into that app a LOT.”

Dopamine machine indeed! Now for me, personally, I don’t intend to download Aspect. It sounds like a waste of money (it’s $34.99) and it also sounds like an intentionally designed time suck. But, when I zoom out and think about where we are in the AI boom, how we’re all going to be progressively spending more and more time interacting with computers, and questioning what the new formats of media may look like - I think Aspect is certainly interesting and more indicative of what the future looks like whether I like it or not. Check out the article, big ups to my man Theo for sharing it with me, and big ups to Hari for writing about Aspect and getting it on all of our radars. Have a great rest of your weekend. Talk to you all next week