I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
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lokimedes
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.
jillesvangurp
During the industrial revolution, the purpose wasn't to enlighten the masses but to make sure they could work in factories and work with complex machinery. So that meant being able to read/write, work with numbers, etc. And there as a need for engineers, mechanics, etc. that could make all this machinery work, that could work in systematic ways, etc.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
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justonceokay
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
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quantified
A lot of being Catholic is just receiving and producing words. Mass is basically an exchange of words. With a little music and a one-way flow of cash. Confession is, well, words. The profession of priesthood is basically one of words. Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
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sublinear
> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
Ah I love this article. I'm now thinking about the idea of encouraging coworkers to orally defend their design documents which are using more AI generated content. People keep saying that we have to focus on what comes before and after code and I think this is a good place to apply friction and avoid building fragile systems.
croemer
Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons.
I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.
During the industrial revolution, the purpose wasn't to enlighten the masses but to make sure they could work in factories and work with complex machinery. So that meant being able to read/write, work with numbers, etc. And there as a need for engineers, mechanics, etc. that could make all this machinery work, that could work in systematic ways, etc.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
A lot of being Catholic is just receiving and producing words. Mass is basically an exchange of words. With a little music and a one-way flow of cash. Confession is, well, words. The profession of priesthood is basically one of words. Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Criticisms
Ah I love this article. I'm now thinking about the idea of encouraging coworkers to orally defend their design documents which are using more AI generated content. People keep saying that we have to focus on what comes before and after code and I think this is a good place to apply friction and avoid building fragile systems.
Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons.
Also, Pangram says 100% AI generated (some sections with high confidence): https://www.pangram.com/history/af8d47c1-dcbd-48ed-83a8-eda6...