I feel for the artists who silently walk the knife's edge on AI adoption. Total rejection and acceptance are perfectly rational in their own ways.
@jackconte really moved me with this talk and reminded me that to be human is a creative endeavor.
youtube.com/watch?v=17_HcR95…
Jack put words to the struggle of:
Do I complete acquiescence to machine values or employ a defensive, possibly overly rigid posture towards AI?
And
Is there a part of me intrigued by the new medium and its unique affordances and willing to adapt while staying human?
I have a pet theory too - that the suckiness and stuckness of modernity comes not from a lack of frontiers but from a mindset that does not know what is "enough" and cannot accept limits.
A debt-based monetary system which requires growth has led us to colonize the world's territories, extract the world's resources, engineer demand for unnecessary things, expand to monetize all human attention to grow the economy via social media, and financialize to the point of absurdity.
Now with few frontiers to grow to, we are stuck unimaginatively optimizing rent seeking positions by off-shoring knowledge work, implementing AI, importing h1bs and now moving to a near full simulated economy with agentic workflows and commerce.
Instead of examining the purpose of technology and guiding it towards human ends, we have become pawns in a autonomous arc of progress in which humans have been been demoted to means serving the ends of capital and technology.
The dominance of a particular strain of technological rationality has led us to many believing that we would be better off repeating the process on new planets than restructuring and preserving what we have here.
Having tapped out new growth areas abroad, the machine has returned home to knaw on its own leg and consume what is left to sacrifice to moloch.
If "want" is the disease, "enough" is the antidote.
I have a pet theory that the suckiness and stuckness of modernity is largely due to lack of a frontier. There must be new territory to expand into, places no one yet owns that aren’t choked with rent-seeking parasites.
There was a gap in time between settling the whole Earth and space being economically settleable. If we can build financially viable moon bases now, then thankfully the suck period has ended and a new age of exploration has begun. Expect everything to get better in a million ways small and big.
First post I see on the tl after tweeting this.
Are we living in a global striver's curse?
xitter.cf/foundmyfitness/status/…
Success doesn’t truly make us happier. Why?
Our neurobiology is wired for progress, not arrival. The dopamine system rewards the pursuit. Once a goal is reached, the brain resets and the target moves.
It’s what @arthurbrooks calls the “striver’s curse.” You work relentlessly toward a goal believing it will bring lasting satisfaction, but when you get there, the feeling fades quickly. The trap is thinking the answer is more (more success, money, weight loss, etc).
A better framework: Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want.
Most people try to increase the numerator. But the more powerful lever is reducing the denominator (wanting less).
Patrick Fitzgerald retweeted
I’m bearish on just “capturing every piece of context in the organization.” Context is a garden. Your context must be aggregated, organized, and pruned.
It requires an organizational narrative so that your team and agents can understand, at scale, what should stay, what should go, and what shape the context that remains should take.
My bet is that this will be what “management” looks like in an agentic era, and that will be where knowledge work will shift.
Patrick Fitzgerald retweeted
The public internet is rapidly becoming a middlebrow ghetto. As we converge toward AGI, the only winning strategy in the next-generation attention economy is to reject all conventional signaling and audience growth tactics in favor of uncompromisingly sophisticated work that alienates 99% of viewers, just in order to mobilize a tiny circle of elite individuals in a given domain.
anyone working alone on side projects too? looking to connect with more entrepreneurs.
happy to test prototypes, edit copy, clarify strategy and positioning etc.
If you're hungry and learning fast, let's chat.
we call human mistakes "malfunctions" or "dysfunctions",
whereas machine mistakes are now "hallucinations"
our linguistics increasingly mechanomorphizes the individual and and anthropomorphizes the machines
Who is getting the most grace in this figure/ground reversal?
More than ever we need sensitive and introspective people to counterbalance "great men of history" who "just do" and externalize the costs to society.
This man only thinks in 0s and 1s.
And now we have Kalshi everywhere an eyeball exists and Trump bombing Iran.
Thanks Marc!
Interesting that @rorysutherland would see a category like hoverboards as a [brand] issue.
Did hoverboards fail because the brands weren't trusted?
Would Panasonic or Sony hoverboards have worked?
You could instead use his right brain thinking to conclude a different outcome:
Maybe the social stigma of riding a scooter [in a completely different way] might be less acceptable than the brand risk to consumers
increasingly convinced that our greatest lever for change is simply reengaging the right brain:
@rorysutherland
@ paul kingsnorth
@ ianmcgilgrist
@ douglasrushkoff
@ charles Eisenstein
are doing absolutely essential work as bulwarks against a truly dehumanizing life force
I also am increasingly willing defend the human scale against the machine scale, not because there’s some expected outcome that might further our larger progressive goals in a different way…