It was mid-December 2023. I was on the docks in Carrabelle, Florida, watching the annual Christmas boat parade. The smell of grilled sausage mixed with salt air. Oysters were the main theme—fitting for the oyster capital of the world. My grandkids weaved through the crowd, hunting for something sweet to eat.ChatGPT had launched just 12 months earlier. Nine days after it quietly went live, I logged on. One prompt was all it took. I’ve been using it daily ever since. When voice came to their mobile app that spring, I tried it immediately. Ninety minutes later, I had written five emails and two op-eds. ChatGPT wasn’t just a tool; it was now a partner.
Standing on those docks, I wondered how many people around me understood what was coming. I was betting not many. Even my friends in Silicon Valley remained skeptical. They shouldn’t have been. AI was getting smarter every day and would soon begin to displace millions of jobs. But that paled next to what AGI might do. That May, Geoffrey Hinton—the Godfather of AI—had left Google to sound the alarm. When AI surpasses human intelligence, he warned, it could threaten civilization itself.
That’s when it hit me. A safer AI would need to understand what being human was all about, and it couldn’t do that unless people shared what their everyday lives were like. What if we flipped it? What if AI asked people questions instead of the other way around?All around me stood people who could furnish exactly that kind of information. Using nothing more than a phone and earbuds, they could tell AI how they made decisions based on judgment, values, and emotions—and what happened as a result.The idea was fuzzy, but I could see it. The next morning, I registered LifeTrade.com.
Months later, I was walking in San Francisco when a Waymo glided past. No driver. No hesitation. Just smooth, reliable motion. I felt a sadness I wasn’t expecting. I wasn’t just looking at a car, I was looking at the end of what had been a livelihood for thousands of drivers.I thought about the deckhands and line cooks back in Carrabelle. The common belief was that physical jobs would feel the impact first. But I’d seen what ChatGPT could do, and I knew AI wasn’t coming for manual laborers alone. It was coming for all of us.
What I foresaw standing there in San Francisco has come true.This year alone, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs, many due to AI and automation. As a result, more and more displaced workers have turned to the gig economy as a means of earning money until something permanent comes along.
I created Life Trade to help meet this need. The company’s mission is clear: to offer manual workers, service workers, students, retirees, and professionals a way to help train AI and get paid fairly for doing so.
In today’s global gig economy, task work sadly often pays very little. LifeTrade’s twenty dollars an hour is deliberate. If we want to train AI on human dignity, we also have to treat the trainers who provide the guidance with dignity, whether it’s the stay-at-home parent folding laundry and worrying about the family’s budget, the recent graduate describing what they want in a first job, or a hobbyist in their garage sharing what it feels like to make a product with their hands. These are important conversations that deserve fair compensation.
That moment on the harbor in 2023 has guided me ever since. Admittedly, I have had quite a few sleepless nights wondering if I was chasing something real. What founder doesn’t? But I am convinced, now more than ever, that Life Trade can play an important role in helping AI better understand what it’s like to be human.
Why is this important? If training data comes only from the cheapest sources—annotations, synthetic data, scraped remnants of the internet—then AI learns a flattened version of us. It learns our transactions but not our kindness. Our arguments but not our apologies. And over time, these super intelligent machines may decide there is no real reason to value human beings at all.
This year, Hinton proposed a safeguard: build “maternal instincts” into AI so it genuinely cares about people. It’s the same intuition I had on those docks—that the only way forward is to teach these systems what everyday human experiences actually feel like.
Today, when I think about my grandchildren in that Carrabelle crowd, I know they’ll navigate whatever world these systems help create. At the same time, I don’t kid myself that it will be easy. The future with AI is uncertain and the downside of such powerful systems can be daunting. That’s all the more reason, we have to get it right.
The boat parade still happens every December. It offers a simple way to enjoy a Christmas tradition. LifeTrade’s commitment is simple as well: to give ordinary people, living ordinary lives, a voice in how an increasingly powerful AI views humankind. It’s the only way everyone, my grandkids included, can hope to live in a safer and more peaceful world.