mapping our AI future

Rather than go away, in the future, the term “designer” might actually grow to cover a whole range of jobs in which a person’s main function is to steer A.I. to create something compelling — a product, a service, a process — based largely on their taste.

As artificial intelligence reconfigures every dimension of our societies—from labor markets to classrooms to newsrooms—we should remember the Luddites. Not as caricatures, but in the original sense: People who refuse to accept that the deployment of new technology should be dictated unilaterally by corporations or in cahoots with the government,... See more

In an attention-scarce and knowledge-abundant economy, we’re increasingly buying signals, not inherent expertise.

The economic impact of AI is determined less by the benchmarks the technology meets or the complexity of the tasks it performs and more by how it transforms the systems in which it operates.

The reality of a technology that can perform “economically valuable tasks” occurs when either:

1. There is a new task to perform (like how computers helped us code).


2. It automates an existing type of labor (dishwashers made it so we didn’t have to wash dishes).


3. It makes an existing form of labor more productive (hammers helped us construct homes faster).

the pedagogical value of a writing assignment doesn’t lie in the tangible product of the work — the paper that gets handed in at the assignment’s end. It lies in the work itself: the critical reading of source materials, the synthesis of evidence and ideas, the formulation of a thesis and an argument, and the expression of thought in a coherent... See more

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes,... See more

The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive.

content engineer, which it defined as someone who can use AI to go through all their internal documentation and meeting notes and build systems that turn this information into publishable content.