30 years of Super Mario 64 and I genuinely don’t think people who weren’t there can understand just how magical this game felt. Walking into Peach’s Castle for the first time. Hearing the music. Running down those hallways, finding a painting, and realizing you could literally JUMP INTO IT and enter an entirely different world. Every door was a mystery. Every painting was a new adventure. Every star felt like you’d discovered something nobody else had. The first time you flew with the Wing Cap. Racing that stupid penguin down the slide. Swimming through Dire, Dire Docks. Running around Bobomb Battlefield with absolutely no idea what you were supposed to be doing, but somehow having the time of your life. And the music. God, the music. There was no YouTube tutorial telling you where to go. No internet spoiling every secret before you found it. Just you, your N64, and an entire new game to be explored. I think what makes me emotional looking back is realizing we weren’t just experiencing one of the greatest leaps in gaming history. We were experiencing a kind of childhood wonder you can never quite get back. Those mornings sitting on the floor in front of the TV, completely lost in a world that felt so big. I can still hear the castle music and immediately feel like a kid again.

Gaming is so unbelievably back. Blizzard basically just said “remember everything you were obsessed with 20 years ago?” and brought ALL of it back at once. WoW: Forever is basically going back to vanilla WoW…lvl 60, the original world/era, except instead of just replaying the exact same game they’re adding new zones, 1,000+ new quests, new raids and dungeons, and basically building out the version of old WoW that could’ve existed if they just kept going from there. Then Warcraft III is getting its first new campaign/expansion in 23 YEARS, Diablo V is coming, StarCraft is somehow becoming an open world shooter, AND Diablo is getting an animated Netflix series. Warcraft/WoW, Diablo, StarCraft… these aren’t just games people liked. Entire childhoods and friend groups and years of people’s lives are attached to these worlds. YEARS. THOUSANDS OF HOURS. Vanilla WoW especially was one of those things you really had to be there for. Everyone was playing, you’d get home, and immediately log onto ventrillo and play until 3am. If they actually pull this off we are 100% reentering a golden era of gaming.

AI is probably the biggest prisoner’s dilemma we’ve ever created. Everyone knows slowing down might be safer. But if OpenAI slows down and Anthropic doesn’t, OpenAI loses. If the US slows down and China doesn’t, the US loses. So nobody slows down. That’s what makes this so insane. You don’t need some evil person trying to destroy the world. You just need a bunch of people making the rational decision for themselves over and over until collectively we’ve raced somewhere none of us actually wanted to go. It’s a race to zero. Zero cost of intelligence. Zero time between thinking and doing. Maybe eventually zero need for us at all.

I don’t think people are thinking nearly big enough about what AI could actually mean for science. Most of the conversation is still about jobs, chatbots, writing, coding, images, productivity etc. But some of the biggest changes may come from AI helping us solve problems humans have been idle on for decades or even centuries and simply haven’t been able to crack. Think about how much of modern life ultimately traces back to a relatively small number of humans figuring out something fundamental about reality. Newton understanding motion and gravity. Einstein changing our understanding of space and time. People figuring out electricity, evolution, germ theory, DNA, computation. A human notices something. Spends years and years thinking about it. Connects ideas nobody had connected before and suddenly entire branches of civilization become possible. Like the aqueducts in Rome… Now imagine having systems that can read basically the entire scientific record, analyze enormous datasets, run simulations, compare millions of possibilities, notice patterns humans missed and do it across EVERY field at once. There are mathematical problems people have spent their entire lives trying to solve. There are parts of the ocean we barely understand and species we haven’t discovered. Huge portions of the rainforest we haven’t properly catalogued. Biological systems doing absolutely insane things that we still don’t barely/fully understand… For example, there’s a jellyfish that can essentially revert back to an earlier stage of its life cycle instead of continuing toward death. Animals that regenerate limbs and organs. Creatures that survive radiation, freezing, crushing pressure or almost no oxygen. Nature has already solved an unbelievable number of problems that humans haven’t. We just don’t necessarily understand how to translate those solutions into something useful for us. What happens when AI can map millions of species, proteins, genes and biological mechanisms and start finding connections between them that no individual scientist could ever hold in their head? Maybe something an animal evolved 50 million years ago eventually teaches us how to regenerate damaged human tissue. Maybe some obscure organism in the rainforest contains a mechanism that becomes a cancer treatment. Maybe studying aging across thousands of species reveals something we’ve completely missed about why our own bodies age. I’m thinking Jurassic park was a documentary on the future. Then there’s physics. Dark matter. Dark energy. Quantum gravity. What actually happens inside black holes. Whether there are forms of matter or physical phenomena we haven’t discovered yet. Whether our current understanding of space and time is even close to complete. Maybe time travel as we imagine it is impossible. Maybe it isn’t. The point is that we genuinely do not know what a more complete understanding of physics eventually makes possible. Imagine explaining GPS, nuclear power, an iPhone or landing something on Mars to someone living before Newton. It would sound like magic. That’s the part I keep thinking about. We are extremely used to living inside the discoveries humanity has already made, so we forget there could still be enormous layers of reality we simply haven’t figured out yet. AI doesn’t magically know the answers. We still need experiments, evidence, scientists and the physical world to tell us when an idea is actually true. But for the first time we may be building a tool capable of searching through the space of possible ideas at a scale no human mind ever could…and if even ONE of those discoveries ends up being on the level of electricity, antibiotics, relativity, or computing, the world on the other side of it could be almost impossible for us to imagine from where we are now.

Maybe one of the biggest mistakes modern culture made was treating responsibility as the enemy of freedom. Marriage restricts you. Children restrict you. Owning a home restricts you. Caring for family restricts you. A career restricts you. Community obligations restrict you. Of course they do. Anything meaningful places demands on you. But if you remove every obligation in pursuit of maximum freedom, eventually you’re left with a life where nobody needs you, nothing depends on you and there’s very little bigger than yourself. We talk constantly about wanting meaning while systematically avoiding the exact commitments that tend to create it. And I guarantee you there’s going to be a lot of sad and lonely people in our aging generation because of this nearsighted pursuit.