Fortune's Path Podcast

Jake Levirne On How to Use AI and The Internet the Right Way, How It Affects Our Psyche and How to Use New Tools Ethically.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Fortune’s Path Podcast we chat with veteran computer scientist and product manager Jake Levirne about AI, utopian online communities, his time with Digital Ocean and Docker as well as his new venture Ducky.foo, which seeks to prevent the bounty of AI development from remaining in the hands of the wealthy. We touch on some classic Fortune’s Path subjects such as virtuous monopolies, love as a business value and the nature of knowledge. Enjoy!

Episode Notes

• On the risk of AI programing leading to crummy software: "At the end of the day AI is just a tool, right? And so it's how we choose to use it that could have impacts there. If we allow AI usage to be an excuse to move quickly [when developing software], but sloppily, then yeah, we're going to build more and more software that is is tenuous and has the potential of falling over."
• On the idea of AI being able to help junior developers become senior developers more quickly: "Unless we are intentional as an industry, we run the risk of replacing the natural apprenticeship that's been in place for a few decades."
• On AI taking our jobs: "Humans will always seek to work on the things that they're uniquely able to deliver value on, and I think so we'll just keep doing that in software development. But but I am worried about what the path looks like for people to get to that level of expertise."
• On his new venture Ducky.foo: "Ducky.foo is is the outcome of me wrestling with the disparity that AI assistants are creating in terms of junior developer versus senior developer productivity... Create a human community where more experienced developers can teach and mentor and share their hard won expertise and real world knowledge with junior developers, but do it at scale...it's not novel to think of a community of software developers of different experience levels helping each other out. But I think what is novel is that I think we can hyper scale this type of community by injecting AI into it."
• "Those with the most going into any kind of innovation tend to be the ones who benefit the most." Ducky.foo is hoping to stop this from taking place with AI innovation, and prevent the fruits of AI innovation from resting in the hands of the wealthy.
• On the toxicity of Stack Overflow and general trolling: "here's a place where AI does have a leg up. It's infinitely patient, infinitely pleasant. And so I think That's one thing we can borrow from AI as we're building Ducky.foo.”