Benji
@benji
Benji
Bop Spotter
walzr.com
☕️Interest and 💿Music
quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat... See more
gaurav • Tweet
Let the flame of Definite Optimism burn away the Mimetic virus. Use the Internet to curate your environment, so you can be hyper-mimetic towards the rare few who are anti-mimetic. Copy the people who don’t copy people. Take risks. Build a differentiated skillset. Pursue timeless wisdom, not intellectual fashions. Be skeptical of convention, and... See more
David Perell • Peter Thiel’s Religion
☕️Interest and 📝Learning
Five Jobs
workingtheorys.com
• The question isn't whether humans will work, but what kind of work humans do in the gentle singularity. It's not just art, and "creativity" isn't the only skill we'll need.
• Human work will be in Trades, Research, Art, Community, and Stewardship.
• The creator economy accommodates 8 billion creators when what they’re creating is local community. Robots can make products, but humans make connections.
• Community work is relational labor that AI can’t replicate. Genuine connection requires voluntary bonds and physical presence.
• We're going back to old times when your value was tied not just to your “useful” skills but to your integrated role in the community.
• When everyone has the same tools, stewards become curators of possibilities, choosing which solutions to implement, which problems to prioritize, which futures to pursue.
• This concentration of power creates a stewardship dilemma: the bold risk-takers who champion technological frontiers may also steer us in the wrong direction.
• The AI kings promise an artist's utopia, but we're not retreating to pure creativity, and we're not all becoming artists.
• If we want to compete at scale, we’ll have to play harder and smarter and faster. If we want to feel needed, we'll have to go local.
• Human‑centric layer over AI cores: As AI automates reasoning and procedural tasks, humans will shift into roles that emphasize judgment, relationships, and execution.
• Research thrives on curiosity: While AI can handle experiments and optimization, humans excel at choosing meaningful questions and exploring the unknown.
• Art becomes deeply human: With automation handling craftsmanship, genuine art will be defined by human signature, personal meaning, and connection.
• Community building as relational labor: Local, in-person community spaces where humans foster meaningful connections will be uniquely valuable and beyond AI’s reach.
• Stewardship over technological armies: Governance, oversight, and responsibility for AI deployment will remain in human hands, emphasizing emotional intelligence alongside rationality.
The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org• Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.
• Nothing we do or experience — if the theory is on track — is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.
• Emanating from the mind’s powerful predictive faculty is the haunting inevitability of personal responsibility for shaping our own experience. Centuries after Milton admonished in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Clark writes in a sentiment of especial poignancy in the context of our present reckoning with consciousness and artificial intelligence:
• Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.
Remember that knowledge is a process, not a possession.