Four For Friday | March 7, 2025
LF163 | A16Z's Top Tech Trends for 2025, Vibe Working, Missions for Neighbourhood, Lifepsan gaps + Manus
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.
A16Z’s Big Ideas in Tech
Influential venture firm A16Z put out a list of 50 big ideas in tech. A few choice ones:
Proof of Personhood. In a world of online impersonations, scams, multiple identities, deepfakes, and other realistic yet deceptive AI-generated content, we need “proof of personhood” — something to help us know that we’re interacting with an actual person. The new problem here isn’t fake content, however; what’s new is the ability to now produce that content at much lower cost. AI radically decreases the marginal cost of producing content that contains all the cues we use to tell if something is “real.”
Democratization of health. The last several years have seen the democratization of health through innovative tech options, from AI that analyzes blood biomarkers, to wearables that track biometrics, to accessible full-body screening. These tools empower patients to take control of their own health, giving them unprecedented access to personal data and insights that were once only available in clinical settings.
A second (AI) brain. We all produce a ton of digital exhaust through our text messages, emails, tweets, browsing history, TikTok/Reddit comments, and more. Thanks to LLMs, we can now put all of this unstructured data to use in a “digital brain” that understands how you think and feel. See more on this here.
The So What? Keeping up with the pace of tech is already hard, and getting exponentially harder. A16Z is a good source of digesting what’s hot.
Vibe workers
Rift by Exponential View author Azeem Azaar on the emergence of ‘vibe workers’, an extension of the recent ‘vibe coding’ discussions.
“As LLMs improve, they’re becoming adept at deciphering our incoherent ramblings. You can throw a jumbled idea at them—“I want something that does this, kind of”—and they’ll figure out your real intention, delivering a workable starting point. It’s reminiscent of a parent interpreting a child’s babbling needs: it might sound fanciful, but it’s already happening. It is vibe working.” Here is a version one definition of vibe working: Vibe working is using AI to turn fuzzy thoughts into structured outputs through iteration.”
The So What? Getting the right amount of “vibe” is a new essential skill; how much structure and research should do you before jumping into the vibe. This will evolve.
Neighbourhood missions
Essay by Dan Hill about how we could apply the bold, holistic thinking of “missions” to the relatively small, but complex and dynamic nature of cities.
“Not simply making a neighbourhood safe, secure, simple, and discreetly powered by some distant hydro plant — but a neighbourhood that is also open, convivial, inventive, curious, expressive, ambiguous, restlessly regenerative, locally complex, and globally responsible, and capable of absorbing novelty and difference without killing it?
Occupying this terrain would elicit truly worthy questions of a strategic design-led “Mission Neighbourhood”: what do we stand for as a society, and how tomorrow’s societies might emerge from the fabric of today’s places?
The So What: Think of cities not as static places but dynamic, complex stakeholder ecosystems interacting in pursuit their own (disparate) objectives.
Lifespan - Healthspan Gap
If my work over the past decade has had an objective function, it’s reducing the gap between healthspan and lifespan. This paper shows just how big it is, and identifies the top 4 countries where their populations live longest with frailty and disease, being the US, New Zealand, Australia and UK. It’s almost as it today’s western way of life is killing us. Slowly.
The So What? This healthspan gap is probably a much better indicator of overall success for a nation than GDP. And the 2.6 extra years of frailty that women face should be far more widely known.
Bonus: AI Tool of the Week
Manus - the hot new tool from China that’s billed as the first “truly autonomous” AI agent. Developed by the Chinese startup Monica, it can plan, execute, and deliver multiple complex tasks independently, using an advanced multi-agent system. It writes code, analyzes data, and automates workflows, for example: “research this person and build a website about them” or research a trip to Japan in April.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen