Tagged philosophy
5 essays
- The internet goes headless If intelligence is ambient and free, the scarce layer becomes the interface: the agent that represents you and filters the world before you see it. That is the best filter we will ever have on slop, and the most valuable real estate on the internet, which is why everyone who owns your attention will try to be it. The headless internet doesn't free the individual; it moves the choke point from the platform to the agent, and the only question that matters is who that agent works for.
- Bullshit jobs and the missing 15-hour week Keynes thought we'd be working fifteen hours a week by now, and the productivity showed up roughly on schedule. What we did with it was invent more jobs, including a lot the people doing them privately think are pointless.
- Happiness is a verb Aristotle's word for happiness describes something you do, not somewhere you get to. Translating it as 'happiness' has left a lot of people chasing a thing that was never sitting still.
- The intelligence illusion Every time AI does something we said would be impossible, we shrug and decide that task didn't need intelligence after all. We've been doing this since chess, and it's worth asking what will be left when we run out of things to move.
- AI welfare: foresight or premature? Anthropic hired someone to work on whether AI systems can suffer. It sounds like a joke until you try to write down the test that would settle it, and find that you can't.