Kortina: Virtual assistants must be generalists to compete with humans
Andrew Kortina · Andrew Kortina of Venmo and Fin on Technological Determinism and Work's Relationship to Dignity · Y Combinator · Nov 20, 2018 · at 51:02
Fin co-founder Andrew Kortina contrasts Fin's broad task surface area with typical Silicon Valley startup specialization advice.
0:00 / 0:35
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“With Finn, we're competing with a full-time human assistant and a full-time human assistant will just do whatever you ask them... If we built that, we just wouldn't be competitive with a human assistant. So we kind of took into this, we have to be able to do anything which is really hard.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Andrew Kortina
Kortina: There is nothing morally wrong with doing heroin all day
“I don't want to go, like, sit around and do heroin all day. Like, I'm sure that would be, like, really fun, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But it would be very tough for me to, like, not feel bad about that, even though I don't think it's …”
Kortina: Buddhism does not motivate civilizations to attempt massive projects
“I had this thought once, like, you know, Buddhists are not gonna get us off this planet when the sun burns out. Like, it's a very From my sort of, you know, 50,000 foot view of it seems like a very like internal focused life is struggling. How do I cope with t…”
Kortina: The singularity already happened, and money is the algorithm
“Thought about the singularity is that it already happened, and money is the algorithm that is already controlling all the people and telling them what to do. The machines have already taken over, I think.”
Kortina: Tech companies oversell moral meaning compared to Wall Street
“My problem with the way that Silicon Valley does it is they, they've always had this, like, Wall Street is the bad guys. They're all about making money. Silicon Valley is about, you know, building the future and, you know, like, achieving, like, the American d…”
Kortina: Cultures linked dignity to work to build survival surpluses
“Why would a culture connect dignity with the idea of work? And it's, I just think it's been a useful thing to do. If you live in a very uncertain world, Where there's things like, you know, a horde of locusts can take out the crops for the year, and then there…”
Kortina: Linking dignity to productive work is dangerous in post-scarcity
“As that becomes less necessary and there's more abundance, then we're less sort of resource constrained. That connection between dignity and, like, doing useful work maybe becomes dangerous, and, like, if, you know, maybe not everyone has to be productive, may…”