sari

Adam Mastroianni put this well in a blog post last year where he said, “Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of... See more

LLMs don’t operate on the same plane. They have a view, but not my view. They have some context, and maybe often too much context, but not the context that’s relevant to play this game well. And since an essay really is just a snapshot in time of a person’s brain as a function of all these variables this makes human writing a lot more defensible... See more

Further, this idea that LLMs lack context is more than a raw data problem, it’s a relationship problem. Human writers have a qualitatively different relationship to this information than LLMs do. I don’t have data about myself… I am me. I have an intuition about my audience. When I write about a topic, I don’t know about it, I care about it.

I have always tried to take lots of notes, typically as snapshots of my mental state. What I’m thinking about, what my priorities are, where my attention is going. I’ve persisted with the habit I think because my notes tend to reveal to me a more complex, evocative, varied version of myself than my memory does. My notes show me that I flit around a... See more

Second, most of the folks making the most noise in a technological bubble either i) do not read history, ii) need to make it seem like their technology is world changing and the change is closer than anyone can ever imagine (because otherwise investors would not be willing to hand over their cash) ... or iii) blindly believe the folks who are

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the one thing that humans can do that AIs cannot do is meaning-making.

What is meaning-making? Vaughn’s chosen definition is that meaning-making is “any decision we make about the subjective value of a thing.”

Humans make meaning all the time — in business and in life. We:

1. Decide that something is good or bad. For instance: “diamonds are beautiful”

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What we do with our freedom

The examples of the excruciating etiquette of the aristocratic courts, the marriage market Rhimes dramatised, the civil associations Tocqueville admired, and the Boy Scout movement show us that when the external structure of work disappears, rather than simply relax, we do one of three things.

First, we reinvent work... See more