I joined Notion recently! There’s no place I’d rather be.
I like it here. Notion places a premium on “direct and kind” in communication. For an unshakeably earnest guy like me, that’s perfect.
But, of course, there are more high minded reasons too. Here is the story:
Eighty one years ago, as the war wound down, America’s head of military research, Vannevar Bush, laid out a particularly un-warlike dream in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly. The quest to realize that dream has driven computer people of all kinds ever since.
What was it? He called it the memex: a personal library of not just all the world’s knowledge, but linked and sorted and indexed so that trails and hops of thought could be stored and recreated. He thought it could be created on microfilm — microprocessors hadn’t even been invented yet. But he had a vision.
Chasing this dream occupied Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and other computing pioneers of the 60s and 70s in Palo Alto. It stalked the halls of Stanford and Xerox, Bell Labs and Apple. TimBerners-Lee’s hyperlink was both a shadow of its grand design and a huge leap forward.
The dream is a bicycle for the mind. The spreadsheet helps you do math, but won’t run your accounting for you. The google search gets you information, but won’t write your memo. The phone tracks your friend’s birthday so you remember to call them. Computers can help people be better at being people.
But the dream has a fatal weakness. Do we want a beautiful store of information, neatly organized, ready to make all questions trivial, all code easy to write, all work a snap? Sure. But putting in the annoying work of keeping it all organized and up to date — no thank you! We’ve made progress, but the dream of a real memex, a place where information is organized resiliently and flexibly — we’ve never done it. Till now?
Now, with LLMs, we can finally make the dream happen. You know what things are good at the repetitive knowledge work of moving information from page A to page B? Robots! But only if you use them right.
Thing is, since the 70s, we tech people have been fighting each other about the role of AI. Are computers here to replace human thinking, or to augment it? Are we building robots and factories, or are we building wikis and libraries?
Today, this battle has never seemed more relevant. Team “robots will do thinking for you” is rolling out wonders. Team memex, team “robots will help you be smarter” needs to put some more wins on the board.
And we’re doing it. We’re doing it at Notion.
I’ve spent the last year or so getting my arms around these sorts of problems. And, when you get less grand and more prosaic, much of it boils down to this:
What info (what context) do agents get when? How do you push it, and how do you help them pull it (search it)?
Search and Context. That’s the team I’m starting at. That’s the key to success.