The future

The markets we participate in are intensely gardened. The people doing the gardening have names. It is a set of choices that people with names and addresses and human souls in the process of making. The Citrini piece is written as if the gardeners do not exist — as if the spiral arrives, as if unemployment happens, as if the daisy chain unravels... See more

The fear of mass job displacement is real, but it rests on a flawed premise — that what we currently sit atop are radical, infallible systems of pure market competition. Capitalism has never actually been this. Global markets are, at most, a few hundred people coordinating with each other to make difficult trade-offs, organizing trillions in... See more

Almost all of the language model discourse in recent days has imagined AI like French gardeners — or rather like viruses from outer space, inflicting themselves on society with no concern for what came before. It pretends we have no immune system to radical societal change.

I'm writing about gardens today because I work in technology, and technology is almost exclusively in the business of building new Versailles.

The pattern is so consistent it is almost impossible to see until you write it all out. A new system arrives. It surveys the landscape of whatever came before — the existing tools, the inherited... See more

The next link in the chain was already breaking.

Intermediation.

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of... See more

Prediction is the action that markets perform, as information moves around society and directs attention and resources to attractive destinations. Where they go constitutes a kind of prediction.

In 1957, Peter Drucker wrote in Landmarks of Tomorrow : “Innovation is... a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man’s role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human... See more

My hope is that we use AI to automate the inhuman so we can return to the human. Leaders should stop rewarding performative busyness and start rewarding discernment, creativity, judgment, honesty, clarity, and care. Parents should reclaim attention and focus that attention on what matters most. Creators should create with the lightheartedness of... See more