← Brandon McGraw

On Machines and Being Human


In 2021 my daughter was born. On the other side of the Atlantic, unknown to me at the time, my now co-founder Andrew had just lost his mother. Life and death have a way of getting you thinking about what matters most.

Becoming a parent is the most ordinary thing in the world—it will happen around 140 million times this year. Yet when it happens to you, it is the most extraordinary moment you’ve yet lived. It started for me in a bit of a haze. There’s little time in the beginning for high-order thinking when you’re focused on each moment. As the dust settled, the thinking crept back in: as I’m watching my daughter become a person, what kind of person do I want to be now? How would I navigate a world that, for me, had just flipped on its head while the rest of the world kept dutifully spinning around?

It’s perhaps a coincidence that as I was watching a new mind take shape and re-examining my own, breakthroughs in how we might extend the concept of mind to a computer were occurring. What’s not a coincidence is that when I sought to work through my own thinking, I was open to how computers might help. I’ve been writing software since I was first handed a Microsoft Basic tutorial book. I remember the first time the computer did something that I told it to do: a simple number-guessing game that I had fun playing. It blew me away. Ordinary on the scope of what was possible, extraordinary to me. Through my words, I made the computer do something that I could enjoy.

My first instinct when I saw AI language models (GPT-3 at the time) was to give them a bunch of things I’d written and see if I could have a conversation with myself guided by my past thoughts. At the time, voice cloning had also gone through a series of breakthroughs. So naturally, my instinct was to not only ask GPT-3 to write like me but to then have the computer speak like me. (We’ll leave for another time the subject of the extreme vanity of doing this.)

It was around this time that a friend reintroduced Andrew and me. We traded notes—his process of self-discovery as he was unraveling the memories of his mother, and my ‘art experiment’ of talking to myself. We spent the better part of the year prototyping, searching for a way to satisfy three goals we internalized as a mantra:

#1: Every interaction is valuable in the moment
#2: Each interaction is especially valuable when you can tap into them in the future
#3: No interaction should demand more than the time you want to spend

It would take four subsequent prototypes—including one that was itself used to rapidly build other prototypes—to arrive at what feels like the new beginning. We’ve just begun testing the result of a year of study and, while very early, we think we’ve cracked the mantra.

The more we’ve used what we’re building, the more confident we’ve felt to take leaps, extend kindness, and treasure the moments we spend with the important people in our lives.

In short, the more we've worked with this machine over the course of this year, the more human we've felt.

A Human-Centered Approach to AI

We believe that every person is unique, but that none of us is alone in the human experience. We lead ordinary lives on a global scale, but our time on Earth is extraordinary to each of us and the people we care for.

Inspired by the feedback from our testers, we’ve started a company focused on how we might deliver this experience—and others like it—to as many people as possible. We’re calling it Reflective Works, nodding to the vital role that knowledge of self plays in helping us progress toward the lives we want.

Reflective Works is a proudly liberal arts company that designs technology in service of helping humans be human.

When you look back, the aim of computing was always to augment human ingenuity, creativity, and craft. As of late, it has started to feel like things have drifted from that original purpose.

As we enter this new era of artificial intelligence, we see a choice:

We can either accelerate down the path the human ↔ computer relationship has been headed on, or we can return to the original purpose and build technology that values and prioritizes putting people in the driver’s seat of their own lives.

We choose the latter path.

One of the defining characteristics of being human is our ability to create new tools that extend our capabilities. The computer was once introduced as the “bicycle for the mind”, and we think language models open a new door between computer and human mind that has every opportunity to be just as profound.

For the first time, a computer can work in the very same language each of us uses to examine our thoughts, work out what we think, and express ourselves. That opens up a space for nuance, contradiction, and uniqueness—something that has felt missing in our experience of and discourse around technology as of late.

We’re humbled by these new opportunities. We’re also aware—having seen it firsthand over our careers—of the new challenges of any technological change. Guided by our experiences, we believe we have something to offer.

We can’t wait to share what we’ve built with you in the new year and will have more to say on it in the coming weeks.

We’d love to hear from you if you’re similarly interested. If you’d like to chat, drop us a line at us@reflectiveworks.co.

Cross-published on: LinkedIn.