“While something is “tomorrow,” institutions can hold it at arm’s length: debate it, study it, delay it, run pilots, treat it as optional. The moment it becomes “today,” the debate stops being about feasibility and becomes about distribution, governance, and consequence. The bottleneck shifts away from engineering and toward whether we have the institutional capacity to absorb a new infrastructural layer arriving faster than our social contracts can update.”

This from Indy Johar’s latest newsletter in relation to his first ride in a Waymo.

It resonates for me instead for this last few weeks buzz around Clawdbot and personal AI agents.

As someone who worked speculatively on this back in 2018-2020 it was “tomorrow” – it seems at least now the glimmers are “today”

Of course a significant amount of what we have right now is personalised rather than personal.

You are still a client of a centralised service, even if Clawdbot is running on the shiny new Mac mini you bought.

Lyra (and its parents: Cerebra and Oak) were predicated on “sovereign” personal AI – but maybe that will be “today” rather than tomorrow soon also…