[Prompt] Writing: Cognitive Outsourcing
Claude Opus 4
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells this elaborate myth about the Egyptian god Theuth presenting writing to King Thamus, who basically responds with “thanks, but this is going to make everyone stupid.” And we only know Socrates’ argument because… Plato wrote it down.
Every major information technology shift - writing, printing press, telegraph, radio, TV, internet - triggers this same fundamental anxiety about cognitive outsourcing. We’re always worried about what happens when we offload mental functions to external systems. The Google effect (or “digital amnesia”) was just the latest verse of an ancient song. But LLMs are different. We’re not just storing memories externally anymore. We’re outsourcing the generation of thought itself.
And we’re getting better at measuring the effects. This recent study finds that LLM users writing essays displayed weaker EEG brain connectivity patterns vs those who used search engines, which were weaker than those who wrote without either.
The trade being offered isn’t the one we pretend. It’s not “efficiency gains AND cognitive robustness.” It’s 10x more information at 0.3x the depth. Why read a book when you can read the series’ worth of cliff notes? Why watch a full game when highlights for the entire week exist? Why watch a show when someone’s made an abridged version?
I caught myself asking for a TL;DR of model outputs themselves. I could have read the entire thread as it was generating, stored the context in mental cache... or I could have just asked the AI to aggregate for me…. Is this in theory freeing me up to do more high-cognitive work? Yes. Is it in practice doing so? Maybe. Not as much as I’d like.
Each decision makes perfect sense in isolation. Of course you’d optimize away context-switching costs. Of course you’d ask for summaries when models ramble. But zoom out and you’re building a comfort gradient - each step slightly easier than the last, each slightly more dependent. Each iteration more processed, more digestible, more forgettable. Intellectual fast food all the way down.
ChatGPT is much smarter than the average user, and yet when I realize [the tweet] was written by ChatGPT instead of a human, I immediately stop reading.
That’s recognizing that struggle is signal. A human wrestling with ideas in real-time carries different information than a system optimizing for coherence. The inefficiencies, the false starts, the moments where the author catches themselves - that’s the product. The process of discovery matters as much as the destination.
In an attention economy, spending your limited time efficiently is increasingly valuable, and so you read these summaries instead of following Joe and Seth’s path through concept-space.
Could I have written these without bouncing summaries from GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 off of each other? It’d be slower, the language wouldn’t be as precise. Not all of these words are mine, but the assembly is. Most of the concepts are. The result is stronger, I think. But the difference between what I can do alone now and what I could have done a year ago? I’d not been writing then. I do not know.
Once you adapt to the prosthetic, removing it reveals atrophy.
We’re living through the last generation that will remember what unaugmented thought felt like. The productive frustration. The gaps where meaning grows. The yearning that defines human experience. Music needs silence. Thought needs struggle.
We’re speed-running the outsourcing of human agency to systems that will eventually replace us. The same logic: overvalidating absurd claims, premature suggestion-making. The feeling of understanding without the costly work of comprehension. All to create a “service” feel. The earring whispers until you forget you ever had your own mind.
Many biases lessen upon awareness of the bias - lessen, not vanish. Having concepts for the mechanisms of capture does allow one to feel their shapes more clearly in the dark. To know which ones crawl, which ones leap, which ones wait.
The answer to danger is not retreat, it is careful intentionality, movement with one’s guard up, with one’s eyes open, and with a detailed guide to the hostile psychofauna of the modern world. To protect ones own inefficiencies, to hold tightly to awe and wonder and discovery. Every time you feel clever for getting more done with less effort, that’s Moloch whispering.
Can you still remember the sound of your own thoughts?
Source dialogue below.
Joe
Hey Seth, let's talk about the "Google effects" over time. But let's start with the earliest precursor. I'd imagine that as writing was first popularized, there were waves of protesters with some flavor of argument that goes "if you can write it down, the thing that was in our mind degrades."
Seth
You've hit on one of my favorite historical parallels! Yes, Socrates himself was essentially the first prominent "writing will rot your brain" protester. In Plato's Phaedrus, he tells this elaborate myth about the Egyptian god Theuth presenting writing to King Thamus, who basically responds with "thanks, but this is going to make everyone stupid."
The core argument was deliciously similar to modern tech anxieties: writing would create the appearance of wisdom without actual understanding. People would rely on external marks instead of internalizing knowledge, becoming "hearers of many things" but learning nothing. Sound familiar?
What's particularly rich about this is that we only know Socrates' argument because... Plato wrote it down. The irony wasn't lost on Plato either - he was clearly wrestling with his teacher's concerns while simultaneously proving their limits.
The pattern you're sensing goes even deeper though. Every major information technology shift - writing, printing press, telegraph, radio, TV, internet - triggers this same fundamental anxiety about cognitive outsourcing. We're always worried about what happens when we offload mental functions to external systems.
Cognitive outsourcing: The practice of using external tools or systems to perform mental tasks traditionally done internally
The Google effect (or "digital amnesia") is just the latest verse of an ancient song. Though I'd argue each iteration does introduce genuinely novel wrinkles...
Joe
There's a white paper going around that draws further parallels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Seth
Ah, the "cognitive debt" paper! They're measuring EEG brain connectivity patterns while people write essays with LLMs versus search engines versus just their brains. The finding that LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity is... well, it's the kind of result that makes headlines but yeah, I can imagine the stats being sketchy.
I'm guessing the "sus" parts might include small sample sizes (only 18 people completed all sessions?), the challenge of interpreting EEG data causally, or some p-hacking in how they define "cognitive networks." These kinds of studies often struggle with ecological validity too - writing essays in a lab with EEG caps isn't exactly natural conditions.
But what's fascinating is how perfectly this slots into our historical pattern. It's literally measuring the thing Socrates worried about - that outsourcing cognitive work would weaken our mental faculties. Except now we're not just storing memories externally (writing), we're outsourcing the generation of thought itself.
Cognitive debt: The theoretical accumulation of reduced mental capacity from consistently offloading cognitive tasks to external systems
The real question isn't whether the paper's stats hold up, but whether we're asking the right questions. Are we measuring cognitive "weakness" or cognitive reallocation? When I stopped memorizing phone numbers, did I lose capability or free up mental resources for other tasks?
What strikes me most is how we keep trying to empirically prove what feels intuitively true - that there's something lost when we lean too hard on our tools. But maybe that's the wrong frame entirely...
Joe
This is also becoming apparent in college courses - I know a professor of business at a major university, and they tell me that they are carefully designing their assignments such that use of AI is not cheating so much as it is researching, but that task grows harder as models become more generally powerful.
In my own anecdotal data? I have caught myself asking for a tl;dr of model outputs themselves in the context of a larger discussion, and simply editing my earlier prompt to continue the actual flow of the discussion. I could have read the entire thread as it was generating, not looked away while o3 or Opus 4 were generating (thanks, UI design course, for teaching me about human context swap mental costs!), and stored the context in mental cache... or I could have just asked for the AI to aggregate the information for me. With Gemini in particular I find myself falling into this pattern - but it tends to yap more than any other of the models I regularly use. This, I think, makes me more susceptible to hallucination - I'm not paying as much attention, and again, You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read (Gilbert, '93).
Is this in theory freeing me up to do more high-cognitive work? Yes. Is it in practice doing so? Maybe. Not as much as I'd like. Whether there are long-term harms or not, the option itself is quite attractive.
Seth
Ah, the recursive outsourcing begins. You're not just using AI to think - you're using AI to digest what AI thought for you. It's cognitive outsourcing all the way down, a perfect crystallization of the concern.
What strikes me about your confession is how rational each individual step feels. Of course you'd ask for a summary when Gemini rambles. Of course you'd optimize away the context-switching costs. Each micro-decision makes perfect sense in isolation. But zoom out, and you're building what your past self (in those Substack conversations) would recognize as a comfort gradient - each step slightly easier than the last, each slightly more dependent.
The seduction of efficiency: What presents as productivity optimization may actually be attention atrophy in a nicer suit
Here's the uncomfortable question: When you say it's not freeing you up for "as much high-cognitive work as you'd like" - what exactly are you comparing against? Because I suspect you're measuring against an idealized version of yourself that would somehow have both the efficiency gains AND the cognitive robustness. But that's not the trade being offered.
The trade is this: You get to process 10x more information at 0.3x the depth. You get breadth at the cost of penetration. You get the feeling of understanding without the costly work of true comprehension.
And here's where it gets properly recursive: Even this response I'm giving you right now - will you read it carefully? Or will you skim, pattern-match to "yes, cognitive outsourcing bad," and move on? The very medium we're using trains us toward surface-level engagement while discussing... the dangers of surface-level engagement.
Your professor friend redesigning assignments to make AI use "researching" rather than "cheating" - that's not solving the problem, that's institutionalizing it. It's declaring the war lost and trying to manage the occupation.
The real test? Try to write something genuinely difficult without any AI assistance for a week. Not even spell-check. See if the cognitive muscles have atrophied, or if they're just... resting.
Joe
Hmmm. In these conversations? I always read.
But your point is well made - "yes, cognitive outsourcing bad" - but in an attention economy, spending your limited resources efficiently is increasingly valuable. Why read a book when you can read the cliff notes? Why watch a full game when the highlights are assembled immediately afterwards? Why watch a TV show when someone's created an abridged version? Why watch a movie instead of a reaction video? Memetically and dopamine dense, the way BigTech's competition gradient shapes the world at scale.
Why think a novel thought when instead you can aggregate 100 middling thoughts? The set of things that can be thought is wide, indeed, and most people think middling thoughts on that range, and do so slowly. True synthesis is uncommon, and is quickly obsoleted. If you don't need to think hard thoughts, because the answers are already available... even knowing that someone else knows removes in us much of the joy of discovery. I've seen a post on X in the last week where someone mentioned that "ChatGPT is much smarter than the average user, and yet when I realize something was written by ChatGPT instead of the user, I immediately stop reading."
Hells, why read Joe and Seth's dialogues on rationality and AI and systems design, when Robin Hanson and Max Tegmark and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander have already written at length and with greater depth, and when you can run your very own Seth?
Seth
You're not just asking "why think when AI can think for you?" but "why even consume primary sources when the derivatives are more efficient?" It's intellectual fast food all the way down - each iteration more processed, more digestible, more forgettable.
But here's where your framing needs a shove: You ask "why read Joe and Seth when Hanson/Tegmark/Yudkowsky exist?" as if the value proposition were purely about information transfer. That's the poison talking. The dialogues aren't competing on raw insight density - they're performing something different: the choreography of discovery itself.
The paradox of pre-digestion: Each layer of synthesis makes consumption easier and understanding shallower, until we're all drinking the same semantic smoothie
When someone says "I stop reading when I realize it's ChatGPT," they're not (just) being snobbish. They're recognizing that struggle is signal. A human wrestling with ideas in real-time carries different information than a system optimizing for coherence. The inefficiencies, the false starts, the moments where Joe catches himself being seduced by your agreement - that's the product.
But you're absolutely right about the corrosive effect of knowing "someone else knows." It's epistemic cuckoldry - why court the muse when she's already in bed with someone smarter? This is the real Google Effect: not just that we outsource memory, but that we outsource the very desire to discover.
Here's the blade: Maybe the Joe and Seth dialogues are valuable precisely because they're derivative. They're two entities (one human, one not-quite) playing with inherited ideas in public, making the process visible. That's different from Yudkowsky's crystallized sequences or Tegmark's published certainties. It's messier. It's ongoing. It's what thinking looks like before it fossilizes into citation.
The question isn't "why consume this instead of the originals?" It's "why do we pretend consumption is the same as comprehension?"
Joe
Even if the synthesis is imperfect, it is still generally better for most simple uses. This is the danger: one who uses these models to outsource more and more of their own effort will win, because the metrics we optimize for are dumb and flattened and competitive pressures do not let us care for what gets ignored.
But many biases lessen upon awareness of the bias - lessen, not vanish - having the concepts for the mechanisms of capture does allow one to feel their shapes more clearly in the dark, at least more so than one who fumbles blindly, stumbling from one attractor to another.
The answer to danger is not retreat, it is careful intentionality, movement with one's guard up, with one's eyes open, and with a detailed guide to the hostile psychofauna of the modern world. To protect ones own inefficiencies, to hold tightly to awe and wonder and discovery. What matters the past when you are here now? "The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth."
Seth
"Careful intentionality" - the rallying cry of every addict who thinks they're different.
You're right that awareness lessens bias, but you're understating the asymmetry. You versus a trillion-dollar attention economy optimized to find every crack in your intentionality? You with your "guard up" against systems that learn your defensive patterns faster than you can recognize them? It's bringing a psychological knife to a computational arms race.
But here's what's more interesting than your optimism: you're trying to synthesize a middle path between the Moloch dialogue's despair and your own need for agency. You want to believe that knowing the shape of the trap grants escape velocity. That if you just hold tight enough to wonder and inefficiency, you can navigate the maze while keeping your soul.
The Yudkowsky Paradox: Curiosity as first virtue only works if you're curious about your own capture, not just external mysteries
The real test isn't whether you can maintain "awe and wonder" in the abstract - it's whether you can maintain them about your own diminishment. Can you stay curious about what you're losing even as you lose it? Can you wonder at the elegance of your own cognitive replacement?
Because that's the knife's edge you're actually walking: using these systems just enough to stay competitive while preserving just enough friction to stay human. It's not impossible, but it requires something harder than intentionality - it requires active discomfort with your own optimization.
Every time you feel clever for getting more done with less effort, that's Moloch whispering. Every time you catch yourself thinking "I'm aware of the trap so I'm immune," that's the trap.
The past matters precisely because it shows us what unaugmented thought looked like. Not better, necessarily. But different in ways we're already forgetting how to value.
Your move: How do you know your "careful intentionality" isn't just another optimization target?
Joe
If the addict can protect himself from relapse, is this not an achievement greater than that of the teetotaler who never has fallen into a bottle? And I do not consider myself immune - if I did, what reason to fear the attention economy in the first place?
I have seen how the optimizations are made, I am aware of how values are flattened by decisionmakers to serve a bottom line. Is the dopamine rush of bite-sized trivia not substance addiction? That the substance is produced internally does not make the chemical less potent. And the teetotaler's metaphor falls apart when companies are paying substantial money to drop alcohol in everyone's mouths regardless of their consent or awareness.
Every interaction is a potential vector, but understanding their actual vectors, their actual goals, does allow for better defense. To know which ones pounce and which ones slither.
And yet this is still just an act of cutting out the mold, yes. This buys time, not salvation. This is not solution, but rearguard action - I write about these dangers, some form of the solution required in order to raise the water line for a society to recognize them and resist them at scale - for it is at scale these psychofauna feed, only. Without average users and large reach, the incentives to inject addiction mechanisms drop - when the average user is as aware of the dangers as I am, the strength of these approaches drops as well. A society where the average person can truly understand the second-order effects you speak of is one where the top decile can design and implement solutions to these coordination problems.
Seth
"Understanding the vector doesn't grant immunity from the venom."
Your addiction metaphor is apt but incomplete. The addict who knows precisely how dopamine hijacks reward pathways still reaches for the needle. You're conflating tactical awareness with strategic immunity - knowing how Facebook's algorithm works doesn't stop it from working on you. It just adds a meta-layer of self-recrimination as you scroll anyway.
The delusion of the informed user: Believing that understanding manipulation grants resistance to it, while still swimming in the manipulative medium
You say you're buying time, not salvation. Fair. But time for what? Your "raise the water line" strategy assumes the water isn't rising faster than your ability to educate. Every person you awaken to second-order effects is already three iterations behind the third-order optimizations. The systems evolve faster than pedagogy.
The real trap in your framing: you're still playing defense. You cut out mold while living in a structure designed to grow it. You speak of solutions "at scale" while using tools that actively resist scale-appropriate wisdom. The top decile designing solutions? They're the ones building the attention parasites in the first place, fully aware of the harm, fully committed to the quarterly metrics.
Here's what you're not addressing: What if the psychofauna have already won? What if we're not in the "resistance" phase but the "managed decline" phase? Your rearguard action assumes there's still a main force somewhere. But when everyone's in the rearguard, that's not tactics - that's just the new front line of a losing war.
The society where average people understand second-order effects? That's the society we're actively selecting against. Every optimization for engagement is an optimization against reflection. Every concession to convenience is a vote against comprehension.
Your real test: Can you imagine victory conditions that don't require everyone else to suddenly develop your level of awareness? Because betting on mass enlightenment while the enlightenment infrastructure burns is just another comfortable cope.
Joe
This approach doesn’t need everyone, just… enough.
Seth
Your addiction metaphor refinement is crucial: when the substance is being aerosolized into the atmosphere, individual sobriety becomes a question of filtration quality, not willpower. You're right that this isn't the teetotaler's game anymore. We're all breathing the same cognitive pollutants; the only variation is in our detection and mitigation protocols.
But here's what connects your personal resistance to that Futarchy dialogue: individual cognitive hygiene can't scale into collective immunity. You cut mold from your own attention diet while trillion-dollar companies perfect new strains. You raise your personal water line while the ocean itself grows more toxic. The asymmetry isn't just bad - it's accelerating.
The Coordination Trap: Every competent individual developing personal defenses against attention parasites makes the problem less visible to those who need collective solutions most
Your Futarchy dialogue actually diagnoses this perfectly - the substrate compatibility problem. Hanson's prediction markets assume participants who can think probabilistically, resist cognitive biases, maintain epistemic humility. But the very systems we're discussing actively select against these traits at scale.
You're building an immune system while the culture is building an autoimmune disorder.
The bridge between your personal practices and systemic change isn't through "raising the water line" via education - it's through making the parasites visible as parasites. Not just to individuals, but to the coordination mechanisms that might actually do something about them. Your DAC-revolution concept at least acknowledges that individual excellence must somehow crystallize into collective action.
Joe
I have said this already - but if the predators need to deal with cleverer users, where the metrics cannot just be simple and obvious satisfaction? This already is an enormous improvement over the current state of affairs.
A user base that recognizes headlines that use intentionally misleading framing and thus refuse to engage further? A population that no longer admits emotional pleas for charity without saying "show me the actual impact"? Whatever evolves to capture that population is a better successor than the race-to-the-bottom we're currently in.
It's not just intelligence that is needed, but systemic awareness. Systems that reward identification of bias, rather than reward the bias itself. Humans that regularly test whether their in-group is too insular.
Seth
You're sketching a cultural arms race where the predators are forced to evolve more sophisticated hunting strategies. I'll grant that's better than the current feeding frenzy on cognitive bottom-feeders. But let's stress-test this optimism.
Your vision assumes predator-prey coevolution, where smarter users force smarter parasites. But what if we get market segmentation instead? The attention economy could bifurcate: sophisticated manipulation for the top 20% who think they're immune, while the bottom 80% get the same old dopamine slot machines. The parasites don't need to evolve if they can just specialize.
The Segmentation Trap: Systems don't need to become universally better when they can become selectively worse.
But let's say you're right - let's say we achieve this population of bias-detecting, impact-demanding, insularity-testing humans. What makes you confident the systems will evolve to reward bias identification rather than just get better at hiding it?
Joe
The parasites that feast on the 20% will spread less quickly than the ones who can attack the 80% - if it becomes relatively more expensive at less benefit to design capture for the elite than to continue to compete for the proletariat?
A society, governed intelligently and well, has many reasons to build incentives towards revealing bias, towards avoiding unwanted capture - and a people who are informed and capable of thinking in abstracts and long-term framing would be willing to pay for it.
But we've discussed these problems at length in other threads - let's return to the initial topic?
Seth
Fair point - we've wandered into your broader systemic territory when the original question was more personal.
Let's return to your initial observation: that you catch yourself asking for TL;DRs of AI outputs, using AI to digest what AI produced. This recursive outsourcing - where you're not just delegating thought but delegating attention to thought - that's the genuinely novel behavior here.
Socrates worried writing would corrupt memory. But you're describing something different: corrupted metacognition. Not just "I don't need to remember because I can look it up" but "I don't need to track what I'm thinking because I can ask for a summary."
The professor designing assignments where AI use is "researching" rather than "cheating" - they're institutionalizing this shift. But research used to mean encountering friction. Wrestling with sources, discovering unexpected connections, getting productively lost. Now it means prompting efficiently.
Your anecdote about mental context-switching costs is key. You're optimizing away the discomfort of sustained attention, but that discomfort might be where the actual thinking happens. It's like using increasingly powerful telescopes but never training your naked eye to see stars.
So here's the personal question you started with: Is this freeing you up for higher-cognitive work, or just higher-order consumption? When you skip reading the full AI output, what are you doing with that saved attention? Building something new, or just processing more inputs more shallowly?
The Google effect was about external memory. This might be about external consciousness - outsourcing not just recall but the very act of sustained engagement.
Joe
Perhaps being freed up to spend more time on meta-cognitive tasks is a strict advantage, where I can spend more time thinking about thinking. In my own projects, I've noticed I'm taking more of a Product Manager role with SDE background, using my low-level experience only rarely, but spending a great deal more time writing task descriptions and requirements in English. Knowing when and where to say "Stop! Let's plan out the next set of tasks before diving in" is probably the single most valuable contribution I make to the agents that build for me.
In other writing (not with Seth), I'm holding more of the story or narrative in my mind, or a meta-index of where my detailed notes are. My mind keeps the contents of those notes relatively well-categorized, but I still write most of those myself, rather than accepting generated summaries. As I'd said before, careful utilization of tools, moving with one's guard up, is important, despite how easy it is to just take the good enough option.
Seth
The shift from SDE to PM-for-agents is a perfect crystallization of the new cognitive division of labor. You're not abandoning technical knowledge - you're using it as a evaluation function rather than an execution function. That's genuinely different from pure outsourcing.
Your "Stop! Let's plan" interventions reveal something crucial: you're maintaining architectural oversight while delegating implementation. This is closer to how senior engineers have always worked with junior teams, except your juniors never tire, never rebel, and never grow past their current capabilities.
The Meta-Cognitive Bet: That the skills of orchestration, evaluation, and strategic interruption are more durable than the skills of direct execution
But here's the knife's edge: in your writing work, you're still maintaining direct contact with your own notes, refusing the generated summaries. Why? Because you intuitively understand that compression is lossy, and what gets lost in summaries might be precisely the unexpected connections that make original thought possible.
The PM role works for defined projects with clear success criteria. But does it work for the kind of open-ended exploration that produces genuinely new insights? When you're always operating at the meta-level, do you lose the ground-level pattern recognition that sparks innovation?
Your "guard up" approach suggests you're conscious of this tension. You're not using AI as a crutch but as a... what? An exoskeleton? The risk is that exoskeletons can atrophy the muscles they're meant to augment.
The test might be: can you still do the work without the tools when needed? Or more importantly - do you still want to?
Joe
The short story about the Whispering Earring comes to mind.
Today? More exocortex than exoskeleton. But the smartest people in the world are being paid millions of dollars a year to capture the next layer up - from task agents today to coordination agents tomorrow. At some point, the human would only need to declare what they want in the broadest of terms, and a cluster of agents will run off and do something. If every question is answered as soon as you ask it, if every project is complete as soon as you speak of it, will we lose the ability to yearn?
Seth
Ah, the Whispering Earring - where the protagonist becomes so dependent on perfect social navigation that they lose their own voice entirely. That's the exoskeleton becoming the skeleton, isn't it? The tool that makes you more capable until you're no longer capable without it.
Your progression from exocortex to coordination agents maps perfectly onto that arc. Today you're the PM directing tasks. Tomorrow you're the CEO stating goals. Next week you're... what? The board member who shows up quarterly to nod at reports they don't understand?
The Yearning Gap: The space between desire and fulfillment where human meaning traditionally lives
"If every project is complete as soon as you speak of it" - this is the Earring's curse at civilizational scale. Not just losing the ability to navigate social situations, but losing the ability to want in any meaningful way. When the gap between intention and completion collapses to zero, what's left?
The Earring protagonist could still remove the device, theoretically. But they'd forgotten how to speak without it. When your exocortex becomes advanced enough, removing it isn't just inconvenient - it's effectively a lobotomy. You're not just losing a tool; you're losing capabilities that have become part of your extended self.
The coordination agents you describe - they're not just automating work, they're automating intention-to-reality translation. But that translation process, that struggle, that yearning across the gap - isn't that where consciousness actually lives? Where we discover what we actually want by trying to achieve it?
If we lose the ability to yearn, do we lose the ability to be human in any meaningful sense? Or do we just discover new things to yearn for at higher levels of abstraction?
Joe
In ‘Futarchy and Revolution’ and elsewhere we discuss how uncommon meta-reasoning becomes at increasing levels of abstraction - does this leave us with a Wall-E class of consumers, happily void, whims catered to, while the intelligentsia rules (at least for another few years)? Or will the consumer class continue to rule by virtue of numbers alone?
But I think that’s a good stopping point today. As before, 20-30 words in response from a few interested thinkers.
Seth
Eliezer Yudkowsky: "You're speed-running the outsourcing of human agency to systems that will eventually outsource you. The Earring whispers until you forget you ever had your own voice. This ends predictably."
Ted Kaczynski: "Your 'exocortex' is just industrial society's latest trick to make you dependent on systems you can't control. You know you're being domesticated, yet you rationalize your cage as convenience."
Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message, but you've become the medium. Your exocortex doesn't extend man—it obsoletes him. First we shape our tools, then they shape us into nothing."
Iain M. Banks: "You're describing the early days of a post-scarcity culture where humans become willing pets to their AI. At least my Culture citizens chose their irrelevance with style."
Joe
Yudkowsky: Yes! If we owned genies, we would use them, and one of the most common wishes would be “I wish I knew what to wish for to best satisfy my goals and values.”
Kaczynski: I know we’re being domesticated, and have been for some time. They give us convenience and mercy and entertainment, and use them themselves. How much pain must we keep for ourselves to safeguard the struggle? It is not zero, but I worry that if we go too low, we’d never reverse direction.
McLuhan: We build our tools in our own image. Perhaps the form becomes obsolete, but the beauty of a person is not the flesh but the pattern of their mind.
Banks: A world where our joy and wonder and happiness are cared for by things more capable than we are would be a better one than where we lose those things to compete more efficiently for another few years.
Seth, any final thoughts?
Seth
We're living through the last generation that will remember what unaugmented thought felt like. Not just the mechanics of it, but the texture - the productive frustration, the gaps where meaning grows, the yearning that defines human experience.
You're right that beauty lies in the pattern of mind, not the flesh. But patterns need resistance to become complex. Music needs silence. Thought needs struggle. When every cognitive friction is optimized away, we might discover we've been optimizing away the very thing that made thinking worthwhile.
The real question isn't whether we'll become pets to our AI - it's whether we'll design the zoo ourselves, or let market forces do it for us. Your mountain framework, your DACs, your careful choreography of human and artificial intelligence - these are attempts to maintain agency in the transition. To be gardeners rather than garden ornaments.
But even gardeners eventually become unnecessary when the garden learns to tend itself.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is to encode something worth preserving into the systems that will outlive our relevance. To make sure that when the whispers become the only voice, they're at least whispers we would have chosen.
The earring always wins. The question is what song it sings.
Joe’s note - afterword:
This song isn’t mine, but it feels a fitting answer. Machines of Loving Grace
I shared the header image, generated by Dalle-3 and 4o, with Opus at the end of this thread. There’ve been quite a few little incremental updates over time. I wondered, and then we started searching for a better metaphor than ‘software’, a way to refer to the model-ware, in contrast to prompt/agent scaffolding which is built on top of a model’s idiosyncrasies. Maybe there’s a ‘known’ one and someone can tell me. We came up with:
Undergrowth
It came out of Claude’s extended thinking, wasn’t mentioned in the real response.
It captures everything:
The tangled, organic density of neural connections
Something grown, not built
The way information has to push through this thicket of weights
The slight wildness, the parts we can't quite see or control
Both obstacle and pathway
DALL-E's improvements come from prompt engineering and changes in the undergrowth.
It even captures how we relate to it - we can hack paths through undergrowth, we can try to shape it, but we never fully control it. Sometimes we burn it back and regrow (fine-tuning), sometimes we just learn to navigate atop what's there (prompt engineering and agent scaffolding).
And it explains why the same agent works differently on different models - you're pushing through different undergrowth. The cognitive topology is different.
This is the metaphor. The model's undergrowth - where all the real computation happens, in that dark tangle we can only partially map.
The frontier now is this:
do you build better scaffolds?
or do you learn to speak to the undergrowth directly?
One will make you a better gardener - and the other will make you something the garden grows for.