Lucian was on my lap of the McDonald's playground watching his cousins climb something. smoke from a wildfire in our area had kept us inside rather than on the outdoor structure. on my phone, an integration I was building between a voice agent and Notion was throwing errors I had not seen. Claude was helping me read the errors. Grok was helping me search for what they meant. neither was getting me to a working build.
he cooed.
he watched them. he cooed again. he started to try to interact more, in the small inarticulate way a one-year-old reaches toward older children whose movement is more interesting than anything else in the room.
if this is your first time here, this is a daily newsletter about raising my son in a world that will not require him to work. start anywhere.
three things were running at once.
a wildfire was reshaping the day from the outside. the godkids, sitting with us, have a home that is at risk from the fire. the afternoon had been planned as indoor play time with them, because the smoke had kept everyone off the outdoor structures.
a broken software build was reshaping the day from the inside. the voice agent I was trying to stand up was meant to pay off once it was functional. right now it was returning errors, & the errors were the kind that get solved by more reading, more tokens, more attempts.
& a one-year-old was reaching into a room of older children for the first time in earnest, with no power source other than the room itself.
I want to say plainly what I noticed in that second-best version of a room.
the wildfire required infrastructure to handle. cell towers staying up. the grid staying up. air quality apps running on that grid. emergency services mobilized at a scale the household does not operate at. none of that was a thing the McDonald's playground was producing.
the integration required infrastructure to handle. servers in a datacenter somewhere. an API that had to be up. credentials authenticated against a service in a region that also had to be up. none of that was a thing the McDonald's playground was producing.
the cooing was. the watching was. the reach of a child toward other children, without language, without instruction, was a thing the McDonald's playground was producing on no upstream dependency at all.
I have been writing about AI for a long time as the thing in the foreground. the automation saving the hour. the model doing the work. the system the child might outsource his thinking to. the framing has been mostly AI as the subject of the sentence.
today the subject of the sentence was a wildfire & a broken Make.com workflow at the same time. AI was a tool I was using to debug a different tool. it had moved into the background of the room.
the foreground was Lucian watching his cousins.
I think that is the right way around.
an environment where the material systems & the digital systems strain at the same time makes one fact visible that is not visible on a normal day. the capacities of a human being sort into two categories. the ones that require infrastructure to function, & the ones that do not. the first is vast. it is the one most of the modern world operates inside. the second is small & easy to forget.
a one-year-old reaching for other humans is in the second category. it does not require infrastructure. it has never required infrastructure. it is older than every system around him & it is not vulnerable to any of those systems failing.
that is not a small thing. that is, possibly, the only thing. & it shows up in the room before it shows up anywhere else, in a child who has not yet acquired the words for what he is doing.
by 2044, the systems Lucian encounters will offer him a thousand high-resolution substitutes for the room he was in today. richer stimuli. faster turn-taking. older-child analogues that respond on demand & never require him to wait. the machines will not be wrong about being good substitutes. they will run on infrastructure. they will require power, subscriptions, & his attention spent on them rather than on a cousin whose movement is a little different from his own.
the part of him I want intact at nineteen is the part that, today, with no instruction, in a room that was the second-best version of a room because of smoke, with broken software in his father's hand, oriented toward the actual humans in front of him.
that part is older than language. it is older than every system I am trying to teach him to read. it has to be the substrate everything else is layered on, or the layers will not hold.
when the systems that can fail were failing, the part of him that does not run on systems was reaching. he was choosing the room. without any prompting from me.
What I am holding onto
he watched them. he cooed. he reached for the room. that is the whole scene.
when the material systems strain & the digital systems strain at the same time, the relational field is the only one that does not require infrastructure. it runs on the room itself. it has run on the room itself for as long as humans have shared rooms. it is not impressive. it is foundational.
my job is to keep noticing that part of him, & to not let the higher-resolution substitutes the next twenty years are going to offer him pull him out of rooms with real people in them. especially when the rooms are imperfect. especially when there is smoke outside. especially when something I built for the business is broken on the screen at the same time.
Cheers, JanCarlos
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