Ideas on what becomes valuable when intelligence is everywhere.
The hard part of ethics was never knowing right from wrong. It's noticing the decision in front of you, reasoning through it when two good things conflict, and acting when it costs you something. All of that is trainable, and none of it is being automated.
15 June 2026Nobody gets hired for lifting anymore, but strongmen still fill arenas. When a trait stops being scarce it doesn't vanish, it splits. Intelligence is splitting now, and I have some guesses about where the value goes, plus one place I suspect the analogy breaks.
2 June 2026Software already picks up the tremor in a voice and the change in messaging rhythm that means something is wrong. That half of empathy turns out to be a pattern-recognition problem. The other half, turning toward someone when it costs you, is the half I'd bet on.
22 May 2026The famous passage of the most famous American speech wasn't in the script. That detail has been stuck in my head since the models got good, because it points at what actually moves a crowd, and it isn't composition.
11 May 2026Everyone assumed the machines would take the manual jobs first and the thinking jobs last. The opposite is happening, and I keep coming back to what that inversion means for the one kind of intelligence that never got written down.
30 April 2026For most of history the copy was cheap and you could tell it from the original. Both halves of that are ending at once. What gets scarce next is not quality, it is knowing a thing came from a real person, and scarcity has a way of turning into price.
19 April 2026The model can do almost anything, and the cursor blinks in an empty box. The bottleneck is the person in front of it. I've come to think agency, the capacity to want something and move on it, is quietly becoming the scarce resource.
8 April 2026When a video call with your own CFO can be faked well enough to move 25 million dollars, 'it sounds right' stops working as a filter. What's left is an older question: who is standing behind this, and what happens to them if it's wrong?
28 March 2026I spend more of my week than I'd like choosing between things that are both fine. No metric settles it, and I usually can't fully explain the pick afterwards. That ability has a name, discernment, and I've come to think it's about to be worth more than the producing ever was.
17 March 2026The most famous line about the space between stimulus and response was never written by the man it's attributed to. The idea survived losing its author anyway, which tells you how instantly people recognize the thing it describes.
2 February 2026Frankl said meaning is found. I lean toward made. Either way, most of us never do the finding or the making ourselves: the story of what our worst experiences mean gets installed while we're too overwhelmed to argue with it.
26 January 2026When Festinger's doomsday group woke up to no flood, they didn't abandon the belief. They believed harder. The urge to resolve contradiction runs deep, and I've come to think that resisting it, in the places where the contradiction is real, is a skill worth deliberately building.
19 January 2026Some people can say 'I don't know' without flinching, and when one of them commits to an answer, you believe them. I don't think that's a personality quirk. It's calibration, it's measurable, and most of us are worse at it than we assume.
12 January 2026The mind is very good at reaching for whichever principle justifies what it already wanted. I've come to think the honest test of a value is whether it survives being inconvenient, and most of ours, mine included, mostly don't.
5 January 2026I have never met anyone who thinks of themselves as unfair. The belief is close to universal and almost never checked, which is usually a sign that something is off. On where the tilt hides, what it costs to correct, and why the algorithm inherits the problem rather than solving it.