Ai

A proof is either valid or it isn’t. A sentence either moves you or it doesn’t. The provenance of a thing shouldn’t determine its worth — but in practice, it does, almost entirely. I’ve noticed something odd happening over the past two years, and I suspect you have too. A friend shows you a video, a proof, a piece of writing. It’s good — genuinely good. You say so. Then they mention, almost apologetically, that AI helped make it. And something in the room changes. The praise you just gave suddenly feels retracted, even though nothing about the work itself has changed. Only your knowledge of its origin has. ...

Bitcoin mining turned electricity into money. Knowledge mining turns frontier compute into insights — and the ore body only gets richer as the tools get better. Ten years ago, mining meant running SHA-256 over blocks of transactions until you found a hash with enough leading zeros. You burned electricity, wore out your GPUs, and if you got lucky, you got some bitcoin. The output was economic value, extracted from nothing but computation and time. ...

The age of disposable software was supposed to arrive with AI. It didn’t. What arrived instead is worse — and harder to see. There’s a strange inversion happening in software engineering right now, and most people are too busy shipping to notice it. For decades, the constraint was supply. Good engineers were scarce, so demand for software always outpaced the ability to build it. That scarcity shaped everything: how companies hired, how products got prioritized, how “build vs. buy” decisions got made. If you wanted software, you either paid a lot for someone to build it, or bought something generic off the shelf and molded your workflow around its limitations. ...

The most sophisticated intelligence in the room is still the one you were born with. AI is a remarkably capable tool. But you are not a tool. Lately, a subtle but profound shift has taken place in the relationship between knowledge workers and their tools — not in the tools themselves, but in the psychological posture people have adopted toward them. And as someone who spends as much time studying the architecture of minds as I do the architecture of systems, I find that shift worth examining honestly. ...

AI didn’t arrive. It invaded. And the thing about invasions is that nobody waits for the right time. Let’s stop pretending this is a conversation. It isn’t. The decisions were made. The training runs happened. The data was taken. The papers were published. The money moved. You found out about it the same way you find out about most things that reshape your life — after the fact, through a news article, slightly too late to matter. ...