OpenAI defines their mission as creating "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."
We need to flip this framing.
The economy is best understood as the way humans divide up the work, and distribute the results.
1/4
I want to coin another term, "Pyrrhic Productivity." When AI-coding agents promise speed by removing human effort but end up slowing work by breaking the feedback loops that produce understanding and shifting skilled work from doing to specifying and controlling.
1/9
I received a lot of responses to the Ptolemaic Code discussion, which brought up a good point. The early versions of the Copernican model were actually less practical than the Ptolemaic one
1/4
I hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase.
1/7
People who grew up playing Zork and other Infocom games know that chat interfaces don't have to be perfect to be magical. Conversational interfaces are awesome, and it's amazing to see them develop.
1/11
A general theory of slop: Given enough examples, humans will always learn to identify low-skill, low-effort work, simply because it becomes common.
1/5
It’s absolutely true that AI is reducing jobs, but not like you think. AI is not *doing* those jobs instead of people, AI speculation is redirecting *investment* away from job-creating businesses to capital-intensive businesses.
