Smart, kind, and eventual
A long time ago I read Playing to Win, a book about winning arcade games. One of its key takeaways was the idea of a "scrub." A summary definition:
A scrub is not just a bad player. Everyone needs time to learn a game and get to a point where they know what they're doing. The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game. You can practice forever, but if you can't get over these common hangups, in a sense you've lost before you even started. You've lost before you even picked which game to play. You aren't playing to win.
The backstory is that the author of the book wins arcade games in boring ways sometimes, by exploiting basic advantages like doing the same movie a lot of times in a row. Other players think this is unsportsmanlike, but it doesn't matter: the author wins.
Another story I think of is from a 2010 speech at Princeton by Jeff Bezos, which I'll summarize…
Bezos is with his grandfather, who is smoking. He does some math, which he thinks will impress his grandpa, and figures out how much time each cigarette is taking off his life. His grandpa hears this and says "Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever."
This happened when Jeff Bezos was 10. Whether his legacy has been defined by kindness or cleverness I'll leave up to the reader.
Ehrenberg suggests the dichotomy of the forbidden and the allowed has been replaced with an axis of the possible and the impossible. The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in something like kilowatt hours—the raw capacity to make things happen. With this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to weariness—weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
This is from The World Beyond Your Head, which blew my mind recently.
The AI had also written some copy. “Are you tired of starting your day with a bland and boring breakfast? Look no further than PureCrunch Naturals.” With a few more clicks, the man showed how the right combination of generative AI tools can, like a fungus, spawn infinite assets: long-form articles, video spots, and social media posts, all translated into multiple languages. “We are moving,” he said, “into a hyperabundance decade.”
This is from The Age of Hyperabundance from Laura Preston in n+1, which is extremely worth reading.
Do we focus on productivity and output more than we do on the ethical valence of what we're doing? Is the abundant output of LLMs so attractive because it is the theoretical limit of maximum productivity / minimal meaning?