I’m driving to Costco Friday morning with mom. She’s telling me that she’s waiting on a friend who is going to help her sell some of her dresses on FB Marketplace. I offered to help but wrapped it in “let me show you how I do it”.
Of course, I was just going to have ChatGPT write the copy, format it for whatever sites she wants to put it, etc. I’ve shown her LLMs before but it’s not part of her routine so I have to remind her that there’s this useful thing out there.
[Aside: This week — I gave it a video of my son’s bike not switching gears to have it help us troubleshoot. And it worked. I feel like I give it 50 screenshots a day but I’m behind on the video thing.]
Anyway, she said something that was both sad — and totally predictable:
A defeated: “If I can have this GPT thing do everything for me what’s the point of talking to people?”
Let me say something before I continue — acceleration might be so destabilizing that we regret it. But the regret will be empty because regret implies you could have chosen differently. AI safetyism suggests we can. But as long as innovation is distributed enough (nebulous word but it’ll do) coordination is fighting a formidable anniversary — the “Guinness book impulse”. Me — I’m long resigned to locally optimizing til the end of humanity, I’m just gonna use the useful stuff.
Back to my mom. I disagreed as agreeably as I could.
In 1990, you could have a discussion about how many wives Henry VIII had. Today, someone goes “why are we arguing about facts?” when Siri is listening. A whole style of conversation went away. Only someone who longs for Crystal Pepsi misses arguing about facts.
AIs are going to make things as complex as drafting and posting an ad as simple as Googling the definition of “ad”. I mean this is the seat of the whole LMGTFY joke. But as AI improves it will encompass so much — including some people’s entire job description.
If we dash into the future as we have with prior transformative GPTs (general purpose technologies not “generative pre-trained transformer”), automation will free us to move up the task complexity ladder. But when intelligence itself, in all its recursive acceleration, is the technology — how human-speed needs adapt to sci-fi capability is anyone’s guess (and if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s plenty of guesses out there).
But yea, if most of your questions start with “How do you…”, before the words hit another’s ears your phone will interrupt — let me AI that for you, until you are trained to only talk about — whatever else there is to talk about.
My mom is still wondering about that one but the answer is obvious even if she isn’t aware.
🔗Further reading
Terms of Centaur Service (9 min read)
Venkatesh Rao
Venkat is one of my favorite writers. He has been co-writing with LLMs in a series called Contraptions under his main substack. He’s also documenting his prompting strategy and techniques. It’s like watching a child discover how to use an unfamiliar toy except the child is a genius and nobody else knows how to use the toy either. You are watching someone tinker on a frontier. This post lays out his case for this and it’s absolutely worth reading.
But, the piece I enjoyed more is an example of this tinkering called The Poverty of Abundance. The article is a critique of the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson but it’s voiced via a 3rd person device — the setup is:
a Venkat’ subscriber response to the question ‘Should I read Abundance?’
The writing is strong, the argument resonates, and I just found it enjoyable (although I’ll admit it was a bit repetitive when I read it again, controlling for the fact that I read it, well, again).
Some quotes I snipped:
- For the better part of two decades, they have constructed and defended a style of procedural liberalism that demoted imagination, displaced conflict, and outsourced moral complexity to the aesthetics of clarity and competence.
- But the wound cannot be closed by the hand that inflicted it. What follows is not a conventional review. It is an accounting.
- Before we can understand the shape of Abundance, we must first study its echo. The reception of this book is not merely a collection of opinions—it is a map of allegiances, a soft launch of an ideological bloc. The chorus of voices praising it are not simply impressed readers; they are participants in a long-running effort to refurbish the liberal project through the idioms of competence, optimism, and post-ideological pragmatism.
- Its very reception reveals its function—not as a proposal for change, but as an aesthetic rebranding of a liberalism in retreat.
- there is no real vision of the good. Abundance offers motion, not destination. It presents politics as tempo, not telos. It cannot say what we are building for, only that we must build faster…It takes the tempo, but not the stakes. It lifts the vocabulary—builders, abundance, speed—but re-instruments it for procedural liberalism. The result is a rhetorical uncanny valley: liberalism in cosplay, moving fast and healing things, in theory.
- This is mimicry, not convergence. The authors do not join the techno-right’s program. They do not defend wealth, capital, or founding myths. But neither do they clearly break with them. Instead, they aestheticize their urgency—appropriating momentum while disavowing ideology.
- Abundance cannot imagine a world. It can only imagine more throughput. More houses, more energy, more bandwidth. But more is not a theory of the good…The liberal imagination, as represented here, has decayed into optimistic logistics—a moodboard of acceleration absent any cosmology.
- And the political imagination this produces is impoverished. Democracy becomes performance. State capacity becomes project management. The future is rendered not as possibility but as a better-run present. This is the endgame of procedural liberalism: aesthetic pacing instead of moral theory. A tone of competence in place of public morality. Abundance does not rebuild the foundations of liberal belief—it rebrands the ruins.
- Abundance is not worth your time—not because it lacks intelligence, but because it lacks courage…It is a strategy, not a vision. A memo dressed in urgency. And you, I suspect, are not in the market for memos…ou are looking for what Abundance cannot offer: a theory of change that begins with conflict and ends with meaning.
Insofar as this is Venkat behind a curtain and I know he is a fan of James C. Scott whose Anarchism essays I finished recently, the critique tracks 😛