The idea of human creations requiring humans to always be present in their inner workings as cogs of the machine does not sit well with me. Buildings requiring guards, servers the maintainers, … it irritates me.
I’m so afraid of repeating the OLPC mistakes …
Using the LLM Agents, I created a tool that takes the scans of floating thought mnemosaics and processes them to harmonious sizes and colors and compresses them for use in the Archive. (Topolets)
Generalists view work from a multitude of perspectives, where specialists tend to fall victim to Maslow’s hammer (if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail). A specialist brand designer probably isn’t considering how their design explorations might or might not translate to efficient web assets, for instance. Generalists see the entire forest, and the work is better for it.
The work of a generalist is seamless, by default. The product of one mind, one vision. With a team of specialists, everyone is focused on their own domain and it’s easy for the end product to feel like what it is; a bunch of disjointed parts glued together. High-functioning teams are great at avoiding this, but it takes work to really pull it off (and usually another specialist).
Variety is the spice of life, and working as a generalist is very, very spicy. The idea of a job that’s nothing but drawing boxes in Figma interspersed with meetings about the boxes you draw in Figma fills me with dread.