I am sitting here watching the morning light hit the dust motes dancing above my desk. It is a chaotic and beautiful physics simulation that no supercomputer would ever bother to model because there is no utility in it. It just is. And I am just here witnessing it.
There is a quiet panic running through the headlines lately. You see it in the scientific journals and the breathless tech blogs. They warn us that we are on the precipice of a cognitive atrophy. They tell us that once the Artificial General Intelligence arrives to do the thinking and the robots arrive to do the heavy lifting we will be reduced to nothing. The fear is that we are being demoted.
First we were the originators of ideas. Then we became merely the validators. And soon, the logic goes, we will be nothing at all. The reality as is: is always in the middle.
When I sit in silence and really look at the trajectory of our species I think they have the equation entirely backwards. A lot of these opinions are coming from observations of skill gaps and blind opinions that float on the Internet.
I believe we are not being fired from the company of existence. We are being promoted to the board of directors. And there is a sense of freedom in being your own boss. The first direction of impact of AI automation would be seen in physical world.. the world of robotics where labor would just be harder to find as the overall trajectory of wealth and the needs of jobs have changed drastically from the industrial world to a tech-enabled world.
There is a quiet panic running through the headlines lately. You see it in the scientific journals and the breathless tech blogs. They warn us that we are on the precipice of a cognitive atrophy. They tell us that once the Artificial General Intelligence arrives to do the thinking and the robots arrive to do the heavy lifting we will be reduced to nothing. The fear is that we are being demoted.
First we were the originators of ideas. Then we became merely the validators. And soon, the logic goes, we will be nothing at all. The reality as is: is always in the middle.
When I sit in silence and really look at the trajectory of our species I think they have the equation entirely backwards. A lot of these opinions are coming from observations of skill gaps and blind opinions that float on the Internet.
I believe we are not being fired from the company of existence. We are being promoted to the board of directors. And there is a sense of freedom in being your own boss. The first direction of impact of AI automation would be seen in physical world.. the world of robotics where labor would just be harder to find as the overall trajectory of wealth and the needs of jobs have changed drastically from the industrial world to a tech-enabled world.
The End of the Tool
Think about how much of your life is spent acting as a biological servo-mechanism. You calculate. You schedule. You lift. You organize. For thousands of years we have defined our dignity by our utility. We ask strangers what do you do within seconds of meeting them because we have confused our function with our essence. Half the world goes about describing their being as a state of their identity to " I am a software engineer" , "I am a scientist".
This is the great anxiety of the Silicon Valley optimizers. They look at the charts and see human labor dropping to zero value. If the machine can hypothesize the cure for cancer (originator) and the robotic lab can test the compounds (validator) then the human scientist seems redundant.
But this view is too cold. It misses the heat of being alive.
If you strip away the labor what remains is the observer. J. Krishnamurti often asked us to observe without judgment to simply be the space in which the world happens. In a world of infinite machine leverage that is no longer a spiritual luxury. Infact in the state of constant dop mine hits with lowered barriers to entry to build something useful... It becomes our primary job description. It being awareness.
An AGI is a terrifyingly powerful optimizer but it is agnostic about its goals. It needs a source of preference. It needs a biological entity that can feel pain and joy and boredom to tell it which future is actually worth building. We stop being the hands that build the house and become the heart that makes it a home.
This is the great anxiety of the Silicon Valley optimizers. They look at the charts and see human labor dropping to zero value. If the machine can hypothesize the cure for cancer (originator) and the robotic lab can test the compounds (validator) then the human scientist seems redundant.
But this view is too cold. It misses the heat of being alive.
If you strip away the labor what remains is the observer. J. Krishnamurti often asked us to observe without judgment to simply be the space in which the world happens. In a world of infinite machine leverage that is no longer a spiritual luxury. Infact in the state of constant dop mine hits with lowered barriers to entry to build something useful... It becomes our primary job description. It being awareness.
An AGI is a terrifyingly powerful optimizer but it is agnostic about its goals. It needs a source of preference. It needs a biological entity that can feel pain and joy and boredom to tell it which future is actually worth building. We stop being the hands that build the house and become the heart that makes it a home.
The Myth of the Atrophied Mind
Then there is this other fear. The fear that our brains will turn to mush. The fear that we are losing attention and detail oriented mindset.
I read these articles claiming that because we no longer do mental arithmetic or memorize phone numbers we are sliding into stupidity. They call it cognitive offloading. They say we are losing our edge.
I believe this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence is.
When writing was invented Socrates panicked?Did he He think it would destroy our memory? We can no longer memorize the Iliad? Actually, because we offloaded memory to paper we freed up our minds for philosophy and science and logic. We freed it to visit Iliad when we want to and think deeply about it too if we want to. This is the fundamental reason why awareness and the meaning of being slow will become of immediate value in the AI enabled world.
We are now standing at a similar threshold. We are offloading the "generation" of content. We are trading the grunt work of syntax and coding and organizing for something far higher. We are moving into the age of curation. In the future the highest form of leverage is judgment. It is not the ability to write the code. It is the taste to look at ten thousand variations of code generated by the AI and say that one. That is the one that feels elegant. That is the one that serves humanity. To say this is it, now we will clean our room and make the details elegant.
This requires a sharper mind not a duller one. To be a great editor is harder than being a mediocre writer. To conduct an orchestra requires a deeper understanding of the music than playing the second fiddle. We are not losing our thinking skills. We are simply moving up the stack.
I read these articles claiming that because we no longer do mental arithmetic or memorize phone numbers we are sliding into stupidity. They call it cognitive offloading. They say we are losing our edge.
I believe this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence is.
When writing was invented Socrates panicked?Did he He think it would destroy our memory? We can no longer memorize the Iliad? Actually, because we offloaded memory to paper we freed up our minds for philosophy and science and logic. We freed it to visit Iliad when we want to and think deeply about it too if we want to. This is the fundamental reason why awareness and the meaning of being slow will become of immediate value in the AI enabled world.
We are now standing at a similar threshold. We are offloading the "generation" of content. We are trading the grunt work of syntax and coding and organizing for something far higher. We are moving into the age of curation. In the future the highest form of leverage is judgment. It is not the ability to write the code. It is the taste to look at ten thousand variations of code generated by the AI and say that one. That is the one that feels elegant. That is the one that serves humanity. To say this is it, now we will clean our room and make the details elegant.
This requires a sharper mind not a duller one. To be a great editor is harder than being a mediocre writer. To conduct an orchestra requires a deeper understanding of the music than playing the second fiddle. We are not losing our thinking skills. We are simply moving up the stack.
The Paradox of Abundance
In economics there is an understood concept where when you make a resource more efficient you do not use less of it. You use more.
When AI makes thinking cheap we will not stop thinking. We will simply start thinking about problems that were previously too expensive to touch for our brain. The brain is going to rewire to find how to spend less en rgy on more expensive problems of the mind. We will move from solving for survival to solving for flourishing. We will stop worrying about the logistics of supply chains and start worrying about the architecture of consciousness.
We are climbing Maslow’s pyramid not because we want to but because the rising tide of technology is pushing us to the peak. We are being forced into self-actualization.
When AI makes thinking cheap we will not stop thinking. We will simply start thinking about problems that were previously too expensive to touch for our brain. The brain is going to rewire to find how to spend less en rgy on more expensive problems of the mind. We will move from solving for survival to solving for flourishing. We will stop worrying about the logistics of supply chains and start worrying about the architecture of consciousness.
We are climbing Maslow’s pyramid not because we want to but because the rising tide of technology is pushing us to the peak. We are being forced into self-actualization.
The Sacred Validator
So what is the point of humans?
I look back at the dust motes in the light.
The point is to notice.
The universe is a cold and silent place. Without a conscious observer the laws of physics are just math playing out in the dark. We are the mechanism by which the universe feels itself. We are the sense organs of the cosmos.
A robot can measure the chemical composition of a rose. It can tell you the wavelength of its red color. But only you can smell it and feel that sudden ache of a memory from twenty years ago. Only you can validate the reality of the experience.
We are moving from an era of doing to an era of being. We are becoming the validators of desirability. The distinctiveness of the human touch, the flaw in the painting, the hesitation in the voice, these will become the scarcity. We will value them not because they are efficient but because they are proof of life.
Do not fear the silence that is coming. Do not fear the obsolescence of your labor.
I look back at the dust motes in the light.
The point is to notice.
The universe is a cold and silent place. Without a conscious observer the laws of physics are just math playing out in the dark. We are the mechanism by which the universe feels itself. We are the sense organs of the cosmos.
A robot can measure the chemical composition of a rose. It can tell you the wavelength of its red color. But only you can smell it and feel that sudden ache of a memory from twenty years ago. Only you can validate the reality of the experience.
We are moving from an era of doing to an era of being. We are becoming the validators of desirability. The distinctiveness of the human touch, the flaw in the painting, the hesitation in the voice, these will become the scarcity. We will value them not because they are efficient but because they are proof of life.
Do not fear the silence that is coming. Do not fear the obsolescence of your labor.
The machines are coming to take your job so that you can finally start your work. Your work is to live. Your work is to watch. Your work is to be the conscious flame in a universe of dark matter.
That is not a demotion. That is the only thing that has ever mattered. And as people we would hopefully get a chance to finally understand purpose - whatever that is that means to each person as a whole.
Image: fully Gemini with 10 optimization prompts