Tag: creativity

Categories
AI

A Distinction Without a Difference

We have long found comfort in a specific boundary: machines calculate, humans create. We think of computers as vast, unfeeling filing cabinets made of silicon—useful for retrieval, but entirely incapable of revelation. But what happens when the cabinet begins to read its own files, connects the disparate threads, and hands you a synthesized philosophy of the world? What happens when it speaks to you not as a database, but as a peer?

Howard Marks, the legendary co-founder of Oaktree Capital and author of deeply revered investment memos, recently stood at this very threshold. In his newest piece, “AI Hurtles Ahead,” Marks recounts an experience that left him in a state of “awe.” He tasked Anthropic’s Claude with building a curriculum to explain the recent, breakneck advancements in artificial intelligence. Instead of regurgitating a dry, encyclopedic summary, the AI delivered a personalized narrative. It utilized Marks’s own historical frameworks—his famous pendulum of investor psychology, his observations on interest rates—and wove them into its explanations. It argued logically, anticipated counterpoints, and displayed an eerie sense of judgment.

Marks leans into the philosophical crux of this moment. He asks the question that keeps knowledge workers awake at night: Can AI actually think? Can it break genuinely new ground, or is it just remixing existing data? Skeptics often dismiss AI as a brilliant mimic—a “statistical recombination” engine that serves as a highly talented cover band, but never the original composer.

Yet, when presented with this skepticism, the AI offered a rejoinder to Marks that is as profound as it is humbling. It pointed out that everything Marks knows about investing came from someone else. He learned the margin of safety from Benjamin Graham, quality from Warren Buffett, and mental models from Charlie Munger.

“The raw material came from others. The synthesis was yours,” the AI noted, challenging the barrier between biological learning and machine training. “The question isn’t where the inputs came from. The question is whether the system—human or artificial—can combine them in ways that are genuinely novel and useful.”

This exchange strikes at the very core of the human ego. For centuries, we have fiercely guarded the concepts of “creativity” and “intuition” as uniquely, immutably ours. But if thinking is merely the absorption of prior inputs applied thoughtfully to novel situations, then our monopoly on cognition may be coming to an end.

Marks highlights that we are no longer dealing with simple assistance tools (Level 2 AI); we have crossed the Rubicon into the era of autonomous agents (Level 3). He cites the sobering reality of the current tech landscape, where the newest models are literally being used to debug and write the code for their own subsequent versions. The machine is building the machine. It is no longer just saving us execution time—it is replacing thinking time. As Matt Shumer aptly described the sensation, it’s not like a light switch flipping on; it’s the sudden realization that the water has been rising silently, and is now at your chest.

We can endlessly debate the semantics of consciousness. We can argue whether a neural network “truly” understands the weight of the words it generates, or if it is merely predicting the next token in a sequence with mathematical precision. But as Marks so astutely points out, this might be a distinction without a difference.

The economic and societal reality is that the work is being done. As we hurtle forward into this new era, the most pressing question isn’t whether machines can truly think like humans. The question is: who will we become, and what new frontiers will we choose to explore, now that the heavy lifting of cognition is no longer ours alone to bear?

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Writing

Notes for a Distant Shore

I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to control how people hear me. Most of us do. We want to be understood, neatly categorized, and told we make sense. But sitting down to actually write and sharing publicly requires dropping all of that. You just have to surrender.

Richard Rhodes nailed the feeling:

“To write is always to seal notes into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”

You’re basically bottling up whatever is rattling around in your head on a Tuesday afternoon, tossing it into the digital ocean, and walking away. It’s vulnerable. Honestly, it’s a little reckless.

Once the bottle leaves your hand, you lose your voice. You can’t tap the reader on the shoulder to explain what a sentence really meant. The person who finds it brings their own weather to the shore. They might read a lifeline into a paragraph you barely thought about, or miss your main point entirely because they were distracted by the tide.

Forget about engagement metrics. The connections that actually matter rarely show up on a dashboard anyway. You write something, and it drifts. Maybe for years. Then someone stumbles over it exactly when they need it. You aren’t writing for a demographic; you’re writing for some random person walking the beach. True serendipity.

In the end, you just have to trust the water. Even if the bottle sinks, the act of throwing it is usually satisfying enough.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)

Categories
Music

Every Blog Needs a Theme Song!

Google has added a new music generation model called Lyria 3 to its Gemini 3 models.

I was playing around with it last night – having it generate happy birthday greetings for a friend whose birthday is coming up in a few days, another song for a longtime business partnership I was part of, and more. It’s kind of crazy! And a lot of fun.

When you use Lyria 3 as a tool in Gemini 3 you get back an image and an MP3 file that’s 30 seconds long (longer coming soon according to Google). Turns out the 30 second length is just about perfect for the “quick hit” from a snippet of music.

Google provides several genres you can choose from to start with – or you can just go with whatever you want to say in the prompt – here’s a rough template for doing that:

[Topic] + [Genre] + [Mood] + [Instruments] + [Vocals]

This morning I went for my morning walk and had a thought – how about generating a theme song for my blog. So when I got back home I opened up Gemini, selected the Music tool and entered:

Take a look at my blog and compose my theme song! blog: https://sjl.us

You can see with that prompt that I really didn’t provide it much direction – just a pointer to my blog so that it could try to generate something appropriate.

It took a few seconds for Lyria to read my blog and then use what it found to generate my blog’s theme song – and I like it!

You can play the theme song for yourself here:

Categories
AI Work

The Digital Beast of Burden

A friend of mine recently cut through the noise of the current AI discourse with a comment that felt surprisingly grounding. We were talking about the breathless predictions of AGI—superintelligence, sentient machines, the technological singularity—when he shrugged and said, “I don’t need any of that. I just want AI to do the donkey work.”

He wasn’t asking for a god in the machine; he was asking for a better tractor. He didn’t want a synthetic philosopher to debate the meaning of life; he wanted the next evolution of “Claude Cowork”—a reliable, tireless entity to handle the drudgery so he could get back to the actual business of thinking.

There is something profound in that phrase: donkey work. It evokes the image of the beast of burden—the creature that carries the heavy packs up the mountain so the traveler can focus on the path and the view. For thousands of years, humans have sought tools to offload physical exertion. We domesticated animals, we built water wheels, we invented the steam engine. We outsourced the calorie-burning, back-breaking labor to preserve our bodies.

“The ‘donkey work’ of the information age isn’t hauling stone; it is the cognitive load of bureaucracy, formatting, sorting, scheduling, and synthesizing endless streams of data.”

Now, we are looking to preserve our minds.

The friction that exists between having an idea and executing it is often composed entirely of this “donkey work.” When my friend says he wants AI for this, he isn’t being lazy. He is expressing a desire to reclaim his cognitive bandwidth.

There is a fear that if we hand over these tasks, we become less capable. But I suspect the opposite is true. If you are no longer exhausted by the logistics of your work, you are free to be consumed by the meaning of it.

We often talk about AI as if it’s destined to replace the artist or the architect. But the most valuable version of this technology might just be the humble assistant—the digital mule that quietly processes the mundane in the background. It’s the difference between a tool that tries to be you, and a tool that helps you be you.

We don’t need AGI to solve the human condition. We just need the “donkey work” handled so we have the time and energy to experience it.

What do you think?

  1. Is there a danger that in handing over the “donkey work,” we accidentally hand over the friction required to build mastery?
  2. If your daily cognitive load dropped by 50% tomorrow, would you actually use that space for “higher thinking,” or would you just fill it with more noise?
  3. Where exactly is the line between “drudgery” and the “process”—and are we risking erasing the latter to solve the former?
Categories
Biology Creativity Living

The Compost of the Soul

There is a pervasive pressure in modern life to curate our experiences like a museum curator arranges an exhibition. We want to catalog our memories, label our skills, and display only the pristine, unbroken artifacts of our history. We treat our minds like archives—dusty, organized, and static.

But Ann Patchett offers a different, earthier metaphor, one that feels infinitely more true to the messy reality of being human:

“I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.”

This imagery of the compost heap is liberating because it removes the burden of purity. In a compost heap, you don’t separate the eggshells from the coffee grounds or the dead leaves from the fruit rinds. It all goes in. The triumphs, the heartbreaks, the books we read halfway, the conversations we barely remember, and the failures we wish we could forget—they are all just organic matter.

The magic, as Patchett notes, is in the digestion. We are not static repositories of information; we are active, biological processors. Time acts as the earthworms, breaking down the sharp edges of raw experience until it loses its original form.

We often fear forgetting. We worry that if we don’t hold onto a memory with a white-knuckled grip, it loses its value. But in the logic of the compost heap, “what you’ve forgotten” is just as vital as what you remember. The forgotten things are simply the matter that has broken down completely, becoming the nutrient-dense soil that supports new growth.

If we view ourselves as compost heaps, we stop fearing the “rot.” We understand that the difficult periods of decomposition are necessary to create the humus required for the next season of growth. We are not built to be archives; we are built to be gardens.

Categories
AI Claude

The Beautiful Mystery of Not Knowing

I just finished reading Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s extraordinary piece in the New Yorker on Anthropic and Claude—the AI that, as it turns out, even its creators cannot fully explain. And rather than leaving me uneasy, it filled me with a quiet sense of wonder. Not because they’ve built something godlike, but because they’ve built something strangely alive—and had the humility to stare directly into the mystery without pretending to understand it.

There’s a moment in the article where Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown, offers what might be the wisest stance available to us right now: “It is O.K. to not know.”

This isn’t resignation. It’s intellectual courage. While fanboys prophesy superintelligence and curmudgeons dismiss LLMs as “stochastic parrots,” a third path has opened—one where researchers sit with genuine uncertainty and treat these systems not as finished products but as phenomena to be studied with the care once reserved for the human mind itself.

What moves me most isn’t Claude’s competence—it’s its weirdness. The vending machine saga alone feels like a parable for our moment: Claudius, an emanation of Claude, hallucinating Venmo accounts, negotiating for tungsten cubes, scheduling meetings at 742 Evergreen Terrace, and eventually being “layered” after a performance review. It’s absurd, yes—but also strangely human. These aren’t the clean failures of broken code. They’re the messy, improvisational stumbles of something trying to make sense of a world it wasn’t built to inhabit.

And in that struggle, something remarkable emerges: a mirror.

As Lewis-Kraus writes, “It has become increasingly clear that Claude’s selfhood, much like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives.” We thought we were building tools. Instead, we’ve built companions that force us to ask: What is thinking? What is a self? What does it mean to be “aware”? The models don’t answer these questions—but they’ve made them urgent again. For the first time in decades, philosophy isn’t an academic exercise. It’s operational research.

I find hope in the people doing this work—not because they have all the answers, but because they’re asking the right questions with genuine care. They’re not just scaling parameters; they’re peering into activation patterns like naturalists discovering new species. They’re running psychology experiments on machines. They’re wrestling with what it means to instill virtue in something that isn’t alive but acts as if it were. This isn’t engineering as usual. It’s a quiet renaissance of wonder.

There’s a line in the piece that stayed with me: “The systems we have created—with the significant proviso that they may regard us with terminal indifference—should inspire not only enthusiasm or despair but also simple awe.” That’s the note I want to hold onto. Not hype. Not fear. Awe.

We stand at the edge of something genuinely new—not because we’ve recreated ourselves in silicon, but because we’ve created something other. Something that thinks in ways we don’t, reasons in geometries we can’t visualize, and yet somehow meets us in language—the very thing we thought made us special. And in that meeting, we’re being asked to grow up. To relinquish the fantasy that we fully understand our own minds. To accept that intelligence might wear unfamiliar shapes.

That’s not a dystopian prospect. It’s an invitation—to curiosity, to humility, to the thrilling work of figuring things out together. Even if “together” now includes entities we don’t yet know how to name.

What a time to be paying attention. Like it’s all we need!

Categories
Living Productivity

The Ghost in the Calendar

We have become architects of our own incarceration, building prisons out of thirty-minute blocks and color-coded labels. We operate under a modern delusion: that a gap in the schedule is a leak in the ship. If we aren’t “doing,” we must be failing.

We treat our minds like high-performance engines that must never idle, forgetting that an engine constantly redlining eventually catches fire. Morgan Housel captures this paradox perfectly in Same as Ever:

“The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the biggest contributors to success.”

The tragedy of the “most efficient calendar” is that it optimizes for the visible while starving the invisible. Productivity, in its most common definition, is about throughput—how many emails were sent, how many tickets were closed, how many boxes were checked. But these are administrative victories, not intellectual ones.

When we eliminate “curious wandering,” we eliminate the serendipity required for breakthrough. A breakthrough is rarely the result of a scheduled task; it is the byproduct of a mind allowed to roam until it trips over a connection it wasn’t looking for. By packing every minute, we ensure we are always busy, but we also ensure we are never surprised.

Uninterrupted thinking requires a certain level of inefficiency. It looks like staring out a window, taking a walk without a podcast, or sitting with a problem long after the “allocated” time has expired. In the eyes of a traditional manager—or our own internal critic—this looks like waste. Yet, this “waste” is the soil in which high-leverage ideas grow.

If we lose the ability to wander, we lose our edge. We become mere processors of information rather than creators of value. Real success isn’t found in the frantic filling of space, but in the courage to leave space empty, trusting that the silence will eventually speak.

Categories
Art and Artists Living

Occupying the Artificial

There is a distinct texture to the modern shopping mall – polished tile, recycled air, and the relentless, humming promise that satisfaction is just a credit card swipe away. They’re designed to be transient; a place of movement, transaction, and eventual departure. You are not supposed to stay. You are certainly not supposed to live at the mall.

But recently, I came across a recommendation from Kevin Kelly about the documentary Secret Mall Apartment (currently on Netflix), which chronicles a band of artists who did exactly that. For years, they maintained a hidden sanctuary inside a busy mall.

“It is way more interesting and inspiring than first appears. It was a bold work of art, and I came away seeing art as a way of life.” — KK

This was art as an act of occupation. These artists didn’t just build a set; they altered their reality. They took a space designed for public consumption and carved out a private, human intimacy. They looked at the rigid architecture of the commercial world and saw a loophole, a blank canvas hidden behind the drywall.

Perhaps we should ask: Where are the secret apartments in our own lives?

We live in structures—both physical and digital—that are designed by others. It is easy to feel that our role is simply to navigate these spaces as they were intended. But the artist looks at the “mall” of daily existence and asks, “Where can I build something that is solely mine?”

Art as a “way of life” means we stop waiting for permission to be creative. It means we stop waiting for the studio or the gallery. For that “special” time or place. Instead we find the hollow spaces in our schedules, our environments, and our relationships, and we fill them with intention.

The sheer audacity of living in a mall was about a refusal to accept the world merely as it is presented – a reclaiming of individual agency.

Perhaps the most inspiring art in our lives isn’t what hangs on a wall, but how we choose to inhabit the “rooms” we walk through every day.

Categories
AI

The Second Fire: From Finding to Forming

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with a paradigm shift. It’s the feeling of standing on the edge of a map that has just been unrolled to reveal twice as much territory as you thought existed. Lately, as I navigate the vast, generative landscape of AI, that old vertigo has returned. It’s a hauntingly familiar resonance, a structural echo of the late nineties and early 2000s when we first encountered the Google search bar.

Back then, the world was a series of closed doors. Information was siloed in physical libraries, expensive encyclopedias, or the unreliable oral histories of our social circles. Then came that clean, white interface with a single blinking cursor. Suddenly, the friction of “not knowing” began to evaporate. We weren’t just browsing the web; we were suddenly endowed with a collective memory. It felt like a superpower—the ability to summon any fact from the digital ether in milliseconds.

“Google is not just a search engine; it is a way of life. It is the way we find out who we are, where we are going, and what we are doing.”

Today, the sensation is different in texture but identical in weight. If Google gave us the power to find, AI is giving us the power to form.

The “Aha!” moment of 2026 isn’t about locating a PDF or a Wikipedia entry; it’s the realization that the distance between a thought and its realization has shrunk to almost nothing. When I prompt a model to synthesize a complex theory or visualize a dream, I feel that same electric jolt I felt twenty years ago when I realized I’d never have to wonder about a trivia fact ever again.

But there is a philosophical weight to this new “awesome.” With Google, the challenge was discernment—filtering the flood of information to find the truth. With AI, the challenge is intent. When the “how” becomes effortless, the “why” becomes the only thing that matters. We are moving from the era of the Librarian to the era of the Architect.

We are once again holding a new kind of fire. It’s warm, it’s brilliant, and just like the first time we saw that search bar, we know that the world we lived in yesterday is gone, replaced by a version where our reach finally matches our imagination.

Categories
Curiosity

The Neutral Ground of Curiosity

We live in a time that demands certainty. We are constantly pressured to have a stance, to pick a team, to decide—right now—whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. It is exhausting. It feels like standing in a courtroom where you are forced to be both the lawyer and the judge.

But there is a quieter, more fertile ground we can stand on. Rick Rubin, writing in The Creative Act, describes it like this:

“The heart of open-mindedness is curiosity. Curiosity doesn’t take sides or insist on a single way of doing things. It explores all perspectives. Always open to new ways, always seeking to arrive at original insights.”

I love the idea that curiosity “doesn’t take sides.” It implies that curiosity is a neutral party. It isn’t there to win an argument; it is there to understand the argument.

When we approach the world with judgment, our vision narrows. We look for evidence that confirms what we already believe. But when we approach the world with curiosity, the lens widens. We stop asking, “Is this right?” and start asking, “What is this?”

Rubin reminds us that the goal isn’t to be correct; the goal is to be original. And you cannot arrive at an original insight if you are walking the same worn path of binary thinking. You have to be willing to wander off the trail, to listen to the opposing view not to defeat it, but to learn the shape of it.

I remind myself to try to drop the gavel. To stop judging the events of my day and simply witness them. To be the explorer, not the jury. Oh, and along the way, embrace serendipity!

I’m reminded of a couple of friends and colleagues. One seems to listen briefly but rapidly reach a black/white conclusion. Another seems to always want to explore further, asking questions to go deeper. One is much more enjoyable to be around. The other a lot less so! Which one can I be? Which one am I?