Yes this is like saying a Formula 1 car doesn't need a pit crew because it's faster than a Honda Civic. The opposite is true: high performance requires operating at the absolute limit of mechanical failure.
Novice athletes operate at 50% of their capacity and have high safety margins. Elite athletes redline at 99%. They need constant medical and PT leverage not because they are "sick," but to manage the structural debt accrued from that volume. The better the athlete, the tighter the feedback loop with their support staff needs to be to prevent system collapse.
Most athletes have (and need!) regular access to shared or personal sports therapists.
What stands out to me in your recounting is: the duration between change and full impact keeps getting smaller.
Broad strokes:
Consciousness -> 100,000 years
Civilization -> 10,000 years
Industrial Revolution -> 100 years
Digital Revolution -> 50 years
AI Revolution -> 10 years
Singularity -> 1 year
Kurzweil’s main point that I recall from his book is that the rate of change is shrinking and eventually becomes near zero so that change happens so fast there is no non-change normal.
This is really cool. I work in the plant industry, and most people don't know this but huge numbers of the plants bought in the U.S. are grown from tissue culture. I would guess it could be in the ballpark of half of all small and medium-sized plants (< 10" diameter), because it brings some benefits when propagating at scale for certain genera. For others, it's too difficult to grow a stable plant from tissue culture, so they need to be propagated vegetatively.
Advertising makes up only 9% of Duolingo's revenue and is also usually a small part of the revenue of most mobile games. Mobile games rely on "whales" (people who pay a lot, like a casino) and Duolingo makes almost all of its revenue on subscriptions. Both require sticky retention but advertisers don't drive the business model or executive decisions at these companies.
Greg (https://greg.app/) is a plant app for people who find plant care mysterious and want their plants to thrive. Unlike wading through Google search results, Greg is personalized and makes growing healthy plants as easy as tying your shoes.
Our mission is to continue expanding our AI to eventually become the "Jarvis" of helping humans grow plants. Imagine if Mark Watney (from the Martian) had an AI guiding him on Mars :). We believe plants are at the heart of many of the existential challenges we face today, like food insecurity and collapsing ecosystems. Understanding/engineering our relation to plants will be key in the decades ahead. We're a Public Benefit Company with a legally-binding charter that we've published online: https://greg.app/charter/.
Before co-creating Greg I was a Director of Engineering at Tinder, where I founded the Growth and Trust & Safety teams (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexross8/). Our team is 7 people right now and we're hiring 10+.
We just closed our seed funding round (unannounced - top 5% amount, we're well-capitalized) and our job postings aren't online yet. We're looking for engineers passionate about ecology, protecting the planet. If you think what we're building is interesting, I'd love an email at alex (at) our website.
We also have a unique equity model, where each teammate owns a (virtually) equal share of the company. This is because we believe our team will be the primary reason we're able to achieve our long-term mission, and we need very strong individuals in every role. We also believe early-stage startup equity is mostly broken for non-founders and non-investors, and we believe it's possible to do better.
Novice athletes operate at 50% of their capacity and have high safety margins. Elite athletes redline at 99%. They need constant medical and PT leverage not because they are "sick," but to manage the structural debt accrued from that volume. The better the athlete, the tighter the feedback loop with their support staff needs to be to prevent system collapse.
Most athletes have (and need!) regular access to shared or personal sports therapists.