To those in AFRICAAM 263,

I'm grateful for the time we spent together, and thank you to Professor Sam for the opportunity to speak.

Our time together has proven to be a seminal moment in helping drex contextualize our mission to "cultivate people's gifts" into today's world. The mission of drex comes from the eternal Good News of Stewardship — a Christian principle which makes known that we've all been given unrepeatable and important gifts and talents, and that it is our duty to steward those gifts into the world for the goodness of others. This Good News is perennial. Regardless of the technological innovations, we as humans have continued to be blessed with — and responsible for — the actualization of Stewardship in the world. Even now, in the current technological age of AI.

Tracing the history of how humans have become even more essential in the process of labor as technology has evolved lets us see something concretely: when the means of production become cheap, human focus moves upstream — to specifying intent for, and verifying the output of, what is being produced. This concept, first brought to my attention by my friend and co-founder Sue, quickly became intuitive in the very field of manufacturing — one I'm deeply familiar with from my studies at Stanford and my work at Apple and Tesla.

The story begins with John Hall, who recognized that more people could make parts well if they focused on the fixturing — so that making a good cut became more intuitive and accessible. What was once expensive to produce, by nature of fewer people being able to make it well, fell in expense. And so the skill that became most valuable was specifying what kind of fixture ought to be used, and what the outcome should look like once machining is done.

This lineage of human specification and verification has now evolved into two quintessential practices — GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing) and SPC (Statistical Process Control) — without which modern manufacturing and assembly would be impossible, and goods would be far less accessible. You hold the proof in your pocket:

In a perfect world, a designer would only communicate intent (specification) and recognize the result (verification), and never worry about how a part gets made (execution). But what we learn from actually producing parts is that it takes many iterative runs to fine-tune both the specification and the system used to get the output — the harness. In manufacturing, the harness is the actual factory; the goal is for parts to be made seamlessly, without constant intervention. When a run fails to meet the spec, the engineers whose job is to refine the harness take progressively deeper looks under the hood, so the next run produces what was intended.

When making parts got cheap, mechanical engineers didn't disappear — they moved their talents to three disciplines:

In the age of AI, the good news of the human's role is the same. We haven't become irrelevant — we've moved upstream, to the more essential gift we possess: conceptualizing a vision for how to bring our gifts into the world, whether large or small. And we can now draw on the same three disciplines, along with AI — which has made production cheap for almost any action that requires text (letters on a keyboard) — to execute and steward our gifts into the world.

In our talk on April 29th, this is where I feel I left you — without a framework for how to cultivate your gifts using AI, after having convinced you that your gifts had moved upstream to specifying intent and verifying output. I was very touched by the actionable questions you asked about applying this to your coursework — one of you thinking through what it means for writing essays; another asking what this frame would mean for someone in middle school, still learning what, for example, a "good" essay even looks like. I hope this letter brings it around full circle, with conceptual grounding, and encourages you to be a good steward of all you've been given.