> He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of abstraction, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from the data center to other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
> He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of abstraction, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from the data center to other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Criticisms