Laurie Voss:

At some point every piece of software is a formalization of a human desire. Somebody wanted something, and the software is a precise enough statement of that want that a computer can act on it.

We’re all about to become formalizers, but to do that, we first have to listen.

The input the software development industry is about to need in unlimited quantities is people who can extract requirements from humans, define good, and exercise taste, and we do not make those people

Of course, listening is hard. So nerds are gonna try and make an automated, scaled version of listening that takes humans out of the equation, but it just ain’t gonna work very well.

You cannot do product discovery mechanically short of reading people’s thoughts. You can't train it into a model, because it isn't in the training data, because it's in the head of one specific baker who's never written it down and wouldn't know how to if you asked them. Somebody has to go and get it out of her, and then turn it into something exact enough to build, and then check that what got built is actually what she meant, which it never is the first time.

The problem is that a DAO is not an employer or a legally binding contract. The DAO voting to do things has no legal weight. Even if you create a legal corporation to do the bidding of the DAO this doesn't get you out of the problem, because by law the people ultimately in charge must be a named set of human beings. Making it possible for software to employ humans as an independent legal entity is another neat idea but one that definitely does not exist right now.

That’s some pretty wild dystopian stuff if you think about it. Are we trying to make robots our overlords. And for what?

Why does playing a game, or making music, or watching a movie, or sending a message, or any of the millions of other things we spend time doing on the web make more sense or improve if modeled as a currency?

I don’t know. That’s a good question.