michael-dean-k/

When physical labor was automated, we all went to the gym to keep our bodies from atrophying. When intellectual labor gets automated, we’ll all write essays to keep our minds from atrophying.

There's a viral clip of a kid at a college graduation. The camera focuses on him. He’s on the Jumbotron and he happens to have his laptop open, with his ChatGPT up, and you see him scrolling through all his conversations. If I remember correctly, he was flexing his bicep. This flagrant symbol of cheating is a good symbol for the times.

In April I came across a tool on X (Cluely?) with slogans like “take the short way” and “cheat on everything.” Of course, this is rage-bait positioning from a 21-year old founder. If you look into the fine print, it’s more honest: “3.1 Prohibited Uses: b) Using the Services to cheat on examinations, tests or assignments.” The manifesto is a middle ground between marketing and legal: “Why memorize facts, write code, research anything—when a model can do it in seconds? The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage.” On X, they claim that brain chips are the end state of this product. One of the replies called them “morel imbeciles.”

A key point from Nietzche is that our philosophy emerges because it has to. Most people don’t believe things out of principle, they believe things to justify and rationalize their life and decisions. This is just as true for tech founders. You find yourself locked into a technical problem, a way to make money, a way to guide your career, and then suddenly a product is rewriting your philosophical compass.

Just as jogging became popular when physical labor was automated by machines, I wonder if essay writing will become popular when intellectual labor becomes automated by machines. I think it’s a stretch though. The body erodes in a way that is visible and alarming, and so we quickly realize the need to stay moving. I don’t known if cognitive diminishment is as easy to notice.

LLMs are now scanning physical books to get more training data. There’s something eerie about this video: A book lies face up, defenseless, as a black machine thrusts up and down. At the bottom, it uses suction to grab the page, and as it moves up it flashes light to capture the text in high resolution.

Saw an app on X where you "set a conversational goal" in a text thread. After someone texts you, it then runs 1,000 possible conversations, and gives you 3-4 options to pick from that are most likely to bring you to your goal. It turns the spontaneity of conversation into multiple choice, optimized over a superficial, narrow aim. In the demo video, the goal was to “Rizze Annie up at Columbia’s hackathon.”

This is telos maxxing, but we should respect the process. The slow act of creation actually changes your conception of the problem in real-time, so you end up in domains you’d never imagined if you only instantly judged near-final outputs from your prompts.

Where do you see my business headed? Tara, we’ve been out of business for 6 years. You might be getting ripped off and buying dated leads. But I expect that. What really irks me is the copywriting of your automated email; 23 cliches in 9 sentences. I’m not even including the one sentence that name-dropped 16 past clients. I’ll admit that I was finally won over in the final sentence where the word “mosey” was used. I still didn’t reply though.