San Francisco 2025

On 8 September (9 September in Sydney), my first day in San Francisco, the thing that stunned me most was the contrast between the cable car—which requires two drivers to operate (I wasn’t even sure if it could turn)—and the driverless cars now available for hire like Uber. At first, I thought these cars were just test vehicles feeding data, but no—they’re already running as a commercial service. Incredible. Earlier this year, when I was in China, I thought I had seen how far ahead things were. But San Francisco left me worried about how far behind Australia might fall.

I’m fascinated by big shifts that impact ordinary things people interact with every day. I imagine that in the past, cable cars must have felt revolutionary for their time. They could carry many people, travel longer distances, and didn’t need to stop for rest like horse-drawn carriages. That must have felt wonderfully convenient.

It’s no different from how I felt today seeing self-driving cars. Humanity keeps building tools to reduce labour, and now we’ve begun to build tools to reduce mental labour—AI. I’m excited to see where the world will go from here.

But one thing hasn’t changed: human nature. We still find happiness in the same things—comfort, acceptance, freedom. And we still suffer from the same things—hardship, rejection, confinement. I think the technology that will truly create a breakthrough is the one designed to address these unchanging aspects of human nature.