I was born and raised in Moscow—a big city, not southern at all, and very far from the real sea. But we used to go to the seaside often with my parents, usually in the summer. And I have this vivid feeling from those moments: you drive and drive, and then bam, there it is—the sea in the distance.

That moment left such a strong emotional mark on me that even now, whenever I see the sea like that, far away, I feel a little spark of joy. And now it’s not even far from home anymore, you’d think I’d be used to it—but childhood emotions always take over.

By the way, have you noticed how some trees already have deep red leaves? like in the fall, even though it’s May? It’s a particular kind of maple.

About three thousand years ago, in India, the epic Mahabharata was composed — one of the longest literary works in human history, roughly four times the length of War and Peace.

The most famous part is the Bhagavad Gita (“Song of God”), where Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna how to live rightly and understand his duty.

But there are other parts too, like the episode called The Questions of the Yaksha. In it, the wise prince Yudhishthira is tested by a mystical being with a series of philosophical riddles. One of them is:

“What is the most amazing thing in the world?” Yudhishthira replies:

“Day after day, countless people die. Yet the living act as if they are immortal. That is the most amazing thing.”

I came across this line while reading a popular science book on physics (The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli) — the topic was time. The discussion veered into philosophy, and this thought felt perfectly placed.

We crave super-smart assistants and even potentially human-killing superintelligences because they promise productivity boosts. But high productivity and hyper-efficiency sometimes ruin everything. Those cases are rare, but they do exist.

Romantic atmospheres, for example, often conflict with optimization. And I don’t just mean romantic as in intimacy — I mean those times you stumble into a cozy bar with live music, or someone’s preparing your meal slowly at a famous spot. In those moments, you want to slow down. You want things to be inefficient, and definitely not automated.

As technology, robotics, and automation spread deeper into every corner of life, we’ll start to value the non-automated more and more. Sure, there will be plenty of fake “handmade-style” experiences, but in a world where basic needs are solved, there could be a massive renaissance of what’s real — or whatever will replace the word authentic. A return to warmth and imperfection, on levels we can’t really imagine yet — just like we can’t quite imagine a world of abundant generosity with no need to work.

Lem, in Solaris, also touched on the importance of subjectivity — that as humans, our own context still matters deeply. Consciousness is, in many ways, how we feel, which makes it ultra-subjective. Then again, who knows? Maybe machines will get so good at mimicking that kind of subjectivity, we won’t be able to tell the difference. That idea, of course, was most beautifully explored in the original Blade Runner — where the line between real and fake blurs so much that the only thing left is the feeling of realness. And once we reach that point… maybe automation won’t ruin anything anymore. Or maybe it’ll ruin everything.

Absolutely all complex processes or global changes always have many causes and many influencing factors. It's never the case that it's just one thing. Even two or three, five, etc., many, very many and in a perfect soup of different angles and proportions.

And this is something like all reasonable people understand. But since from an evolutionary perspective we were just monkeys in the jungle not too long ago, we have a strong proclivity to explain everything to ourselves and our neighbors very simply: everything always has a main cause, which consequently leads to one specific result. And as it turns out, this predisposition of ours to explain everything simply continues to only be reinforced by culture and even education, even science.

Moreover, success in society is often the result of focus and concentration on one thing. Not always, but almost always. This also reinforces the feeling that this one thing can radically change something big and mega-complex. Therefore, it's simply necessary for us to constantly remind ourselves about the complexity of everything happening. However, this already begins to push us to another extreme - attempts to find the insidious plans of conspirators, and conspiracy theories on this basis grow like mushrooms after warm rain. As they say, the situation is complex, and we just need to remember this and not go to extremes, although we're not very good at it.

Cognitive psychologists and scientists, especially Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - back in the 70s of the last century in Israel, and then in America, dug up this whole topic and called it "heuristics and biases." Heuristics are these mental shortcuts that our brain takes to avoid dealing with all the complexity that constantly weighs on us. Like, sort of instinctive reality simplifiers. And they conducted a mass of experiments where they showed how even the smartest people - professors, mathematicians, doctors of science - still fall into these simplification traps. For these discoveries, Kahneman even received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (Tversky unfortunately didn't live to see it, otherwise he would have probably received it too). They showed that all of us, even the most educated, often operate on autopilot, which is evolutionarily designed for survival in the savanna, not for understanding inflation or the causes of wars. And what's funny is that awareness of this error doesn't protect against it - it's built into the very construction of our brain, like some bug that has already become a feature. But when we suddenly have an epiphany about this, some not-bad findings emerge.

In the mid-20th century, sciences studying humans — psychology, neurology, and many others — started booming. How does the brain work? What is memory? What is consciousness? How do these things interact and develop inside us — and most importantly, how can we make them better? There was a huge explosion of new theories and concepts. One of them, in 1943, was proposed by Raymond Cattell. He was working on differential psychology — personality traits, abilities, motivation — and came up with the idea that we actually have two kinds of intelligence: fluid and crystallized (Theory of Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence).

Fluid intelligence is what helps us solve new, abstract problems, when there’s no ready-made knowledge to fall back on. Crystallized intelligence leans heavily on what we already know and have experienced. We all have both, and we use both all the time — just in different proportions depending on the situation.

They say fluid intelligence peaks around 27 years old, while crystallized peaks somewhere around 50–60, and starts to decline closer to 70. But it’s also strongly linked to mental load. Like in sports: if you keep challenging yourself, you stay in better shape. Even though some experiments showed that memory exercises don’t really boost fluid intelligence, it varies a lot from person to person — and especially among people on the autism spectrum.

They did experiments where people could either solve tasks intuitively, inventing their own methods, or by leaning on learned skills. The common belief was that young people invent more, and experienced people use what they know. But honestly, I think that’s a bit forced. Different personalities matter more: some people will "do it right" since childhood, and others will be reinventing their own bicycles till the end of their days.

This whole topic is resurfacing now because many top tech companies have lost their founders — and the big, seasoned managers have taken over. The problem is, breakthrough innovation needs fluid intelligence, which younger people usually have more of. But in corporate environments, not many experienced adults are thrilled about being told what to do by some young, relatively inexperienced — even if pretty sharp — guy. It’s tolerated when it’s a charismatic founder leading the charge. But when the founder is gone — dead, stepped down, or just drifted off — the leadership falls to the seasoned veterans, and it’s hard to put them under some untested newcomer.

But again — I don’t fully buy this age-based thinking. It’s not just about age. It’s also very much about profession. Managers think differently from product designers. Even product managers think differently. What these companies really need is not just "younger and fresher" blood — but people across different levels of experience, all focused on building great products, not just improving margins. Sure, companies need everyone — not just product designers. But the focus of leadership really defines where the company goes.