AI is Inadequate Terminology
Ants appear fascinating until you realize you are one.
Human civilization peaked in 2025. This will be known as the last year humans used technology.
Blacksmiths and shoemakers have long since become product designers and software engineers. Modern peasants are Amazon and Uber workers, Netflix subscribers.
It remains to be seen if the kings will be Elon, Sam, and Trump, or maybe Google + Glen Weyl, or perhaps Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng. But the point of this blog is that doesn’t matter.
Very few things actually matter. Harvard, for example, held on for the duration of the American experiment until the 2010s. At that point YC officially supplanted the university and Thiel Fellowship twisted the dagger. Now Harvard is dead.
Today, the seeds of social change may look like chatGPT, Kalshi, stablecoins, and TikTok. But really it’s much more profound than “markets” or “the internet”. Consequences include fundamental changes to the notion of a country, let alone the independent status of Hollywood studios.
The very essays of Publius and the songs of Lin-Manuel are in themselves intelligent systems because reality is computational in nature. Ideas and information, including physics and biology, are not rife with mimetics. Rather, all of these phenomena are impelled by a universal objective function to decrease entropic decay. Anthropomorphizing, the universe wants to postpone its heat death.
Taking this perspective reveals how centuries of pent-up change are about to be unleashed along this underlying axis, and by 2050-2100 the world will look inconceivably and (seemingly) unpredictably different from today. It turns out the Great Stagnation was a misnomer; the last 50 years were just an incubation period.
Einstein is not the right test for creative intuition anymore. It’s obviously a proxy like Turing’s that will soon be meaningless. The real test will not be humans asking questions to the computers—it’s silicon that poses puzzles to carbon. Are you ready?
Henceforth, technology uses humans.
interesting take, I was thinking similar thoughts recently about how markets drive people more than people drive markets, over the long term. excited to read more of your writing!