Day By Day, Everything’s Changing

For the past months, I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen that I feel like a cyborg. My two most frequent keystrokes after ctrl+t (new tab) are “cha-[enter]” and “per-[enter]” *, each creating dozens of new tabs + hundreds of queries within ongoing instances daily. *ChatGPT and Perplexity, respectively.

Quick preface: no, general LLMs aren’t yet immediate answer machines that must be 100% right and robust on every single half-assed prompt or question. If this is your immediate or subconscious reaction, ask why are you holding novel intelligence technology to a standard that even the greatest human geniuses and authorities never came close to meeting? I’ve said the equivalent of this hundreds of times in the last months of real-world conversations – especially to good friends who mean so well but immediately scoff at the idea that real intelligence itself could be harnessed through keystrokes. Am I / we / this entire online and professional world of super-users just insane? Early?

Friend: “Dude, AI is really not that useful for what I do“
Me: “Man, when’s the last time you **really** tried it?“… “What kind of prompt are you using?“
Friend: “Like a year ago or a few months ago” … “My work is way too complicated for AI”
Me: “But don’t you literally read, write, and communicate for a living? With mostly machines or exclusively through machines to other people who’re using machines? And talking about or working with various types of digital or digitized data?”

I get that the premise requires beyond sci-fi level reality and pace (only 2.2 years since ChatGPT, if anyone’s counting, or 2 weeks since Deep Research, 1 month since R1. Each daily announcement confounds even the most professional tinkerers, blackbox alchemist researchers, and definitely capital allocators (although TBD on the collective judgment as expressed through clearing price).

But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how many people are convinced – the fingers have been snapped, and there is simply a new reality: we now have ubiquitous access to still-evolving digital superintelligences that:

• Eliminate 99% of all friction points to human curiosity, starting with digitally accessible knowledge
• Rewrite the physics of creativity, including removal of most bottlenecks to hyper iteration (including dependence on other humans), and
• Offer unbounded leverage for those willing to be as native or cyborg-like as possible

EOY 2025 will look and feel nothing like the world of February 2025 (time of writing), and the years ahead will be vertical in capability evolution, and therefore, relative human positioning & somewhat, significance. I am optimistic – because every piece of societal middleware that AI completely erodes frees thousands & millions of individuals from the spiritually artificial bottlenecks to their potential. There is literally nothing stopping me from pursuing any hobby, idea, or passion project than my own curiosity. Prompt any model to teach or guide you from any starting point, even click and do things for you, and eventually your only limitation is focused time (attention is really all you need) and physical world access and bodily health (until the AIs help the roboticists solve this as well). In some not-so-distant future, it’s just you – Love, spirit, divinity, god-seeking, parenthood, and play become the primary function of humanity of life itself, not just for the financially independent. Maybe the dharmic dream – of a life of enlightened fulfillment for its own sake – can be technologically possible.

I am scared – because these bottlenecks were also the massive sources of meaning, real income, and candidly – alpha – in being someone with more bias for action, capability for data digestion & analytics, and pace of learning that will… never come back. To quote someone with much more capital and access than I: “Go down the list of fucking skills man. We are super fucked.” Who makes it to the complete friction-removal and material-abundance from above? Do we avoid a Butlerian Jihad (“Man may never be replaced by a machine, so death penalty to all those who make thinking machines”? If all the advantages of intellectual effort & grit are undifferentiating (after the short-term of using them to leverage and amplify yourself with AIs), do we accelerate to hyper-feudal reality, where welcome back to the most important things about you being your physical loadout and spawn point (genetics & parents / household)? Do we even care to solve the misery of those still far away from any white-collar lifestyle in the first place? Are we assuming they, and everyone not developing & distributing AI, keeps the real-world running until robotics do that too?

In the meantime, do you just catch the game last night, have kids, and do your best? Never, ever quit – sure – but definitely re-strategize, right? Do you start rewiring your connection points to your soul (not just your brain) to fully reinvent your entire life identity with every model update or research paper you have to ironically use AI to understand? Do you fully detach from any and all expectations about the implicit game (work smart/hard, be honest, and do disciplined things with long-term horizons instead of being hedonistic or YOLO for all decisions)?

Does it even help to download “expert” perspectives that get reset every week? Do you, should you, and to what extent will you trust the executives today leading, enabling, and distributing these technologies today? “If you really think you’re going to create God, do you want to put God on a leash with one entity controlling God?”

I don’t really know what to do other than learning every waking second of every day. A never-wrong behavior is: continue to be as kind, curious, and physically healthy as possible, and maybe add in a doubling down on any behavior that reminds you of your humanity – we are accountable only to ourselves.

Om.