Contents
Eleven arguments, in the order they build.
The first six concern the individual. The next three concern how you learn, relate and earn. The tenth is collective. The eleventh tries to take the other ten apart.
- 01 Meaning9 min
Meaning Was Never the Job
For two centuries we bundled meaning with economic contribution. Automation forces the unbundling. What the evidence actually shows about idleness, status and the collapse of structured time.
- 02 Purpose8 min
From Assigned Role to Chosen Stake
Meaning is retrospective; purpose is directional. As necessity stops issuing assignments, purpose has to be selected — and selection is harder than obedience.
- 03 Curiosity8 min
The Anesthetic and the Amplifier
Curiosity is driven by an information gap that must stay open long enough to hurt. Instant answers close it. Whether AI amplifies or anaesthetises your curiosity depends on one habit.
- 04 Judgment13 min
The Ironies of Automation
The central essay. Why judgment is the last thing to be automated and the first thing to atrophy, what the aviation record already taught us, and why verification is not cheaper than generation.
- 05 Responsibility9 min
You Cannot Delegate Accountability
The responsibility gap, the moral crumple zone, and why "human in the loop" is usually accountability theatre. A test for telling real oversight from the decorative kind.
- 06 Cognitive Fitness9 min
We Built Forklifts, Then We Built Gyms
Cognitive offloading is ancient and mostly benign. A specific subset is not. How to tell them apart, and what a training regime for the mind actually looks like.
- 07 Learning & Education15 min
What the University Is Still For
Is a degree still worth it? A function-by-function answer, a rubric for the actual decision, and the barbell model of what to learn — deep domain grounding at one end, meta-skills at the other, nothing in the hollowed-out middle.
- 08 Relationships & Presence9 min
The Things That Require a Body
What machines structurally cannot do, why frictionless intimacy is not intimacy, an honest look at AI companionship, and why trust becomes the scarce infrastructure of a synthetic world.
- 09 Work & Economy11 min
Complement or Substitute
Automation acts on tasks, not jobs. Where the value goes when intelligence gets cheap, why this wave hits the safe harbour everyone was told to run to, and how to position without pretending to forecast.
- 10 Civilization12 min
The Higher Planes, Made Concrete
Four levers that are actually adjustable — what we measure, how we distribute, how we decide, and what we honour. Plus the three failure modes worth naming out loud.
- 11 Steelman11 min
The Case Against This Site
If the arguments on this site are any good they should survive their best opposition. Here is that opposition, without softening, followed by the minimal claim that still stands.