There is a distinct texture to working with a truly capable person. It is a feeling of relief, specific and profound.
When you hand a project to a junior employee who “gets it,” the mental load doesn’t just decrease; it vanishes. You don’t have to map the territory for them. You don’t have to pre-visualize every stumble or correct every navigational error. You simply point to the destination, and they find their way.
I was thinking about this feeling—this specific brand of professional trust—when I read a recent observation from two partners at Sequoia regarding the current state of Artificial Intelligence:
“Generally intelligent people can work autonomously for hours at a time, making and fixing their mistakes and figuring out what to do next without being told. Generally intelligent agents can do the same thing. This is new.”
The phrase that sticks with me is “without being told.”
For the last forty years, our relationship with computers has been strictly transactional. The computer waits. We command. It executes. Even the most sophisticated algorithms have essentially been waiting for us to hit “Enter.” They are tools, no different in spirit than a very fast abacus or a hyper-efficient typewriter.
But we are crossing a threshold where the software stops waiting.
The definition of intelligence in a workspace isn’t just raw processing power; it is the ability to recover from failure without supervision. It is the capacity to run into a wall, realize you have hit a wall, back up, and look for a door—all while the manager is asleep or working on something else.
When Sequoia notes that “this is new,” they aren’t talking about a feature update. They are talking about a shift in the ontology of our tools. We are moving from an era of leverage (tools that make us faster) to an era of agency (tools that act on our behalf).
This changes the psychological contract between human and machine. If an agent can “figure out what to do next,” we are no longer operators; we are managers. And as anyone who has transitioned from individual contributor to management knows, that is a fundamentally different skill set. It requires clearer intent, better goal-setting, and the ability to trust a process you cannot entirely see.
We are about to find out what it feels like to have a digital colleague that doesn’t just listen, but actually thinks about the next step.
I was reading the coverage coming out of CES 2026 this week, and the silence was deafening. Just a year ago, the industry was shouting about the “AI PC” as the inevitable successor to the computing throne. Every laptop lid, keyboard deck, and press release was plastered with the promise of Neural Processing Units (NPUs) and local intelligence.
But looking at the tepid market reaction—and Dell explicitly dialing back the “AI sermon” this year—I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. It reminds me of the “3D Ready” stickers that adorned every television set circa 2011.
There is a distinct pattern in consumer technology where the hardware cart gets placed miles ahead of the software horse. We saw it with 3D televisions, a technology that demanded we wear goofy glasses to watch a limited library of content, offering a friction-heavy solution to a problem nobody really had. We saw it, more tragically, with Apple’s Vision Pro. Despite being a marvel of engineering, it stalled because it asked too much of us (financial and physical weight) for too little return in our daily lives.
The “AI PC” seems to be falling into a similar, albeit subtler, trap.
The issue isn’t that AI is a fad—far from it. Agentic AI and local models are transforming how we work. The issue is the marketing category. Consumers are realizing that an “AI PC” is just… a PC. The magic of AI isn’t in the hardware badge or a dedicated Copilot key; it’s in the software that runs anywhere. We are realizing that we don’t buy “Internet PCs” anymore, we just buy computers. The utility is ubiquitous, not proprietary to a specific chassis.
When technology truly succeeds, it disappears. It becomes boring. The “flop” of the AI PC isn’t a failure of technology, but a failure of hype. It is the market collectively shrugging and saying, “Show me the value, not the specs.” Until the software experiences are so undeniable that we can’t live without that local NPU, the “AI PC” will remain a marketing sticker, destined to peel off and fade away, much like 3D glasses or Vision Pros gathering dust for those few who bought them.
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?
There’s something beautiful about watching someone fall in love. Whether it’s with a person, an idea, or a pattern hidden in the fabric of the world, that moment of irreversible fascination changes everything. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, sitting in a classroom at Wharton, the object of affection was a financial instrument that would ultimately reshape his entire worldview: the option.
“Taleb first learned about options at Wharton, and he fell irreversibly in love with them. He realized options had a curious trait—they were nonlinear.”
That single sentence contains the DNA of an entire intellectual revolution. But to understand its power, we need to unpack what Taleb saw—because it wasn’t just a way to make money. It was a way to understand life itself.
The Asymmetry Secret
A financial option is deceptively simple: it’s the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell something at a predetermined price. For this right, you pay a small premium. If things go your way, you profit disproportionately. If they don’t, you only lose the premium.
This is where the nonlinearity lives. Linear relationships are predictable: work an extra hour, get an extra hour’s pay. Put in $100, get back $102. Nonlinear relationships are different beasts entirely. They’re the lottery ticket that costs a dollar but could return millions. The insurance policy that protects against ruin. The startup equity that could go to zero—or transform your life.
Taleb’s genius was recognizing that this wasn’t just a financial trick; it was a fundamental principle that nature herself had been using for millennia. Evolution is nonlinear. Trial and error is nonlinear. Every major breakthrough in human history has been the result of some version of optionality: small, bounded downside with an unbounded, open-ended upside.
The Philosophy of Maybe
What makes options so seductive is how they invert our relationship with uncertainty. Most of us fear not knowing what’s next. We build careers, relationships, and worldviews that prioritize predictability. We try to forecast, plan, and control.
Options do the opposite. They thrive on uncertainty. The more volatile and unpredictable a situation, the more valuable the option becomes. While everyone else is trying to predict the future, the option-holder simply needs to position themselves to benefit from any future.
This insight became the cornerstone of Taleb’s later work. The Black Swan warned us about unpredictable events with massive consequences. Antifragile took it further, arguing that we shouldn’t just survive volatility—we should build systems that gain from it. The secret to antifragility? Optionality. Lots and lots of small, distributed options.
Living the Optional Life
Taleb’s irreversible love affair points to something profound about how we might structure our own lives. We’re taught to make big bets: choose the right career, the right partner, the right house. We’re told to specialize early and commit fully. But this is the linear path—the path of predictable inputs and outputs.
The optional path looks different. It’s the programmer who maintains side projects that might become the next big thing. It’s the writer who publishes experimental essays while working on a conventional book. It’s the professional who keeps a broad network rather than a narrow expertise. In each case, the downside is limited (time invested, opportunity cost) while the upside remains unknown—and potentially life-changing.
This isn’t about being noncommittal or afraid of depth. It’s about strategic diversification of opportunity. Taleb himself embodies this: trader, philosopher, statistician, essayist. Each identity is an option, a way to capture value from different domains without being trapped by any single one.
The Curious Trait That Changes Everything
Nonlinearity is everywhere once you know to look for it. A single introduction at a party could lead to your life’s most important relationship. Reading one random book could shift your entire intellectual trajectory. Saying yes to one uncomfortable invitation could open doors you didn’t know existed.
The key is to stop trying to predict which option will pay off and start accumulating them systematically. Take the coffee meeting. Send the cold email. Learn the seemingly useless skill. Write the blog post nobody might read. Each is a small premium with an asymmetric payoff.
Most will expire worthless. A few will change everything.
The Irreversibility of Seeing
What makes Taleb’s love affair “irreversible” is that once you see the world through the lens of optionality, you can’t unsee it. The linear narrative of career ladders and five-year plans begins to look not just outdated but fragile. The obsession with planning and prediction starts to seem like a collective delusion.
You begin to notice how much of life is already optional, if only we recognize it. Every skill you learn is an option on future opportunities. Every genuine connection you make is an option on collaboration. Every time you preserve your freedom instead of cashing it in for immediate rewards, you’re buying an option on a more interesting future.
Perhaps the ultimate option—the meta-option—is the decision to fall in love with optionality itself. To commit to non-commitment. To build a life where the premium you pay is measured in curiosity, flexibility, and the willingness to look foolish most of the time in exchange for being right when it matters.
Taleb’s revelation in that Wharton classroom wasn’t about finance. It was about freedom. The freedom to benefit from a world we cannot predict. The freedom to be wrong almost all the time yet still win. The freedom to fall in love with possibility itself.
Once you understand this, there’s no going back. The linear world dissolves, and everything becomes optional.
Note: my Readwise feed contained this quotation from Scott Patterson’s book Chaos Kings – a book I very much enjoyed. Sometimes, when one of my Readwise highlights really strikes a chord with me, I will wander off into AI land and play with various chatbots asking for them to take the highlight and write a longer musing triggered by what’s being said. This morning I spent quite a bit of time exploring this one and really enjoyed reading some of the chatbot responses. This particular one comes from one of the Chinese open weight models: Kimi K2. I’d read that K2 was a particularly good writer so I wanted to give it a whirl. I enjoyed reading what it created and wanted to remember it by posting it here in my blog and in my journal. My life’s motto has been “seek serendipity” which is related to a lot of Taleb’s thinking.
I started asking some of our AI models for their best thinking on what innovative new products might come about from the new collaboration of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s io. I’m using this prompt:
Come up with 20 innovative and smart product ideas for a hardware product designed by the merger of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s io.
Here’s the first one – from Claude Sonnet 4 (released earlier this morning):
Here are 20 innovative hardware product concepts that would embody the merger of OpenAI’s AI capabilities with Jony Ive’s design philosophy:
Personal AI Companions
1. Neural Mirror
A seamless wall-mounted display that serves as your personal AI assistant, reflecting your schedule, health metrics, and thoughts back to you through subtle visual cues and natural conversation.
2. Whisper Stone
A smooth, palm-sized device that acts as your personal AI confidant, designed for private conversations and emotional support with haptic feedback that mimics human touch.
3. Ambient Lens
Smart glasses with nearly invisible frames that overlay contextual AI assistance directly into your field of vision without disrupting natural sight.
Creative Tools
4. Ideation Sphere
A levitating orb that captures your voice, gestures, and sketches to help brainstorm and visualize ideas in 3D holographic projections.
5. Composer’s Baton
An elegant conducting wand that translates your gestures into AI-generated music, allowing anyone to compose symphonies through natural movement.
6. Story Loom
A fabric-textured tablet that weaves narratives as you write, with the surface physically changing texture to match the emotional tone of your writing.
Home Intelligence
7. Hearth Hub
A minimalist fireplace-inspired device that becomes the emotional and functional center of your home, managing everything through natural conversation and warm, ambient light.
8. Garden Mind
Sculptural planters embedded with AI that monitor and communicate the needs of your plants while teaching you about botany through gentle, organic interfaces.
9. Kitchen Oracle
A seamless countertop surface that recognizes ingredients and guides cooking through projected instructions and temperature control.
Health & Wellness
10. Pulse Ring
An ultra-thin ring that continuously monitors your health and provides AI-powered insights through subtle vibrations and a companion app with crystalline data visualization.
11. Sleep Cocoon
A bedside device that creates optimal sleep environments while learning your patterns, featuring a breathing light rhythm that synchronizes with your rest cycles.
12. Meditation Stone
A smooth, weighted object that guides meditation sessions through gentle warmth, subtle vibrations, and AI-generated soundscapes.
Communication
13. Translation Pendant
A jewelry-like device that provides real-time language translation through bone conduction, designed as an elegant accessory.
14. Memory Vessel
A beautiful container that captures and preserves family stories, voices, and memories, allowing future generations to have conversations with AI recreations of loved ones.
15. Empathy Bridge
Paired devices for long-distance relationships that share ambient presence, heartbeat, and emotional state through synchronized light and warmth.
Learning & Development
16. Wisdom Cube
A geometric puzzle toy that adapts its challenges to teach everything from math to philosophy, physically reconfiguring itself as you learn.
17. Mentor’s Lens
A desktop magnifying glass that identifies objects and provides rich educational context, turning any surface into a learning laboratory.
Professional Tools
18. Decision Crystal
A multifaceted desktop object that helps analyze complex decisions by visualizing data patterns through light and form while providing AI-powered insights.
19. Presentation Wand
A minimalist pointer that transforms any surface into an interactive presentation space, responding to natural gestures and voice commands.
Accessibility & Care
20. Guardian Angel
A discreet wearable device for elderly or vulnerable individuals that provides AI companionship, health monitoring, and emergency assistance through elegant, non-stigmatizing design.
Design Philosophy
Each concept emphasizes the marriage of cutting-edge AI functionality with Ive’s signature approach:
Radical simplicity
Premium materials
Intuitive interaction
Design that feels both futuristic and timeless
The products focus on enhancing human capability rather than replacing human connection, with interfaces that feel magical yet completely natural to use.
Be careful hiring “experts” when what’s really required is “innovators”! The best people are able to do both. But they can be very hard to find and difficult to pick out of a crowd.
David Sparks (aka MacSparky), dropped a casual bombshell on a recent podcast, the kind of offhand remark that lodges in your mind like a burr on a sock.
Paraphrasing, he said something like: “AI seems to be a boon for doctors and a threat to lawyers.” He was commenting on how he’s observed that sense among the members of his MacSparky Labs community.
It’s the sort of statement that invites you to pause, tilt your head, and wonder what lies beneath.
Sparks, a lawyer himself who gave up his legal career a few years ago, knows one of those worlds intimately. His words carry the weight of someone who’s walked the halls of courthouses and squinted at screens late into the night.
So what’s he pointing out that the rest of us might miss?
Start with doctors. Medicine is a profession of patterns and particulars, a dance between the general and the specific. A patient walks in—say, a 52-year-old man with a cough that’s lingered too long. The doctor’s mind whirs: pneumonia? Bronchitis? Something rarer, like sarcoidosis? The human brain is a marvel at this, but it’s not infallible. Enter AI, with its tireless capacity to sift through terabytes of data—X-rays, lab results, decades of case studies—and spot the needle in the haystack. A tool like Harvey, an AI platform now making waves in medical research, can crunch genetic sequences or flag anomalies in real time, handing doctors a sharper lens. It’s not replacing the physician; it’s amplifying her reach. For doctors, AI is like a stethoscope that’s upgraded.
Lawyers, though, face a different challenge. Their craft is less about data and more about argument, a tapestry of precedent and persuasion woven over centuries. Sparks knows this: he’s stood before judges, parsing statutes, coaxing juries with a turn of phrase. But here’s the rub—much of lawyering is rote. Drafting contracts, reviewing discovery, chasing down case law—these are tasks of repetition, not revelation. AI can do them faster, cheaper, and with fewer coffee stains. Harvey, repurposed for legal work, joins programs like ROSS, built on IBM’s Watson, to scan legal databases in seconds, spitting out answers that once took associates hours to unearth. For the grunt work, AI is a scythe through wheat. The threat isn’t extinction but erosion—junior lawyers, the ones who cut their teeth on those late-night searches, might find the ladder’s lower rungs sawed off.
Yet law isn’t just mechanics; it’s theater. A machine can draft a motion, but can it read a juror’s furrowed brow? Can it pivot mid-trial when a witness veers off script?
Doctors heal with facts; lawyers win with stories. AI—Harvey or otherwise—might streamline the former, but the latter resists its grasp—for now. Sparks sees a fault line: medicine gains an important new partner, law sees a new rival.
Update: If you’d rather listen to a podcast discussing this post, try this!
Sometimes the future arrives when you least expect it. This week I spent an hour watching the Meta Connect keynote presentation by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It was amazing. The joy of a live technology keynote – flaws and all – was brought to life once again!
Apple’s iPhone Event
Earlier this month, Apple had its annual iPhone reveal event. Beautifully videoed at locations around San Francisco and Apple Park in Cupertino, the presenters told their stories about the various features of the new iPhones. But even though the presentations were truly beautiful, the whole session was boring. Too long and too “slick”.
Meta’s Connect Keynote
Zuckerberg’s presentation, in contrast, was live in front of an audience – and it had the spontaneity we all remember from those earlier Apple keynotes that Steve Jobs pioneered and other Apple execs continued doing before the pandemic forced the elimination of a live audience and the switch to formal video productions instead. The first demo that Zuck featured began nicely but then quickly failed – the demo gods are still alive and lurking in the background. But the demo fail wasn’t a disaster – it brought humor to the event. We’ve all been there – had something go off the rails when we least expect it. Seeing it happen live was in its own way delightful.
Orion vs Vision Pro
Zuckerberg spoke of several things during his keynote but the one that struck me the most was his introduction of the Orion holographic smart glasses. The obvious contrast to Orion is the Apple Vision Pro, a product which certainly failed to interest me and which seems to have had the same effect on many others. Unfortunately, the perception of the Vision Pro being a market failure hasn’t been helped by Apple’s curious failure to show real commitment to the product.
The Vision Pro won high marks from most reviewers for being an elegant and sophisticated piece of technology. And that elegance is reflected in its price – over $3,500. Because of the design decisions that Apple made, a lot of the cost of the Vision Pro seems rooted in the very high end cameras and screens to bring the real world inside the headset where it’s then augmented with other computer generated screens creating a mixed reality experience.
Meta’s Orion, on the other hand, doesn’t try to do that. Instead the metaphor is one of real glasses where the real world is simply directly visible without the need for the Vision Pro’s high end cameras and displays. As one reviewer commented, the real world is displayed in “infinite resolution” unlike in headsets like that Vision Pro that capture the real world with cameras and projects those images instead. Orion has “good enough pass through”!
In one of his discussions of his impressions of Orion, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson commented about how you could be “sneakily anti-social” using Orion because you could interact with other humans just like you would wearing a pair of glasses. You could be looking at your Instagram feed without anyone else realizing you’re doing so as you maintain eye contact with them as well.
Audio and Visual Transparency
This reminded me of one of the hidden benefits I learned about when I was fitted with hearing aids several years ago. Fortunately for me, my need for hearing aids coincided with the technology in hearing aids maturing to the point where they have become very small, rechargeable with all day battery life, and – importantly and surprisingly – perfect for listening to streaming content from my iPhone. When I’m doing so, I still hear the real world around me and can have a conversation with another person even while there’s music or a podcast playing in my ears. Orion seems visually very similar to my audio experience with my hearing aids!
Concept Cars
Ben Thompson pointed out that Orion is really just a “concept car” at the moment whereas Apple’s Vision Pro is a real product that’s been shipping in volume for over a year. Direct comparisons really aren’t appropriate – but the fundamental design differences between the two are fun to think about and cause me to wonder about bigger implications for the future of both products.
Back to the Future
There’s so much happening in high tech right now that it’s an amazing time to be alive. When you overlay AI on top of these audio and visual capabilities, things get even more interesting – and exciting. Zuckerberg’s keynote brought back memories for me of those years of Steve Jobs proudly showing off Apple’s latest and greatest innovations. It’s pretty clear to me that the founder-led aspect does shine through at times like these. As does the joy of watching a live performance!
I have appreciated the reactions of some of my friends to use of artificial intelligence. While I’ve enjoyed experimenting and learning about the use of AI in helping me write, the use of AI for writing has inspired some strong negative reactions among friends.
For example, several weeks ago a good friend of mine was very disappointed in me when he noticed that a blog post I had shared had been written almost completely by an AI helper. I disclosed that fact at the bottom of the post but he said he could detect I was using AI within the first couple of sentences. Here’s what he emailed:
I saw a blog post with your name attached. That caught my interest, and I anticipated reading your thoughts. After reading a couple of sentences, I realized it was AI-generated text. Skipping to your disclaimer at the end of the post confirmed that. I was deeply disappointed. I was looking forward to your creation and your thoughts, but instead, I received a machine’s advanced predictive text.
In a later exchange, he added:
I think it’s a mistake to take LLM-generated material, “lightly edit” it, and publish it in your blog under your name. In my view, it’s all been poorly written and not worth reading. I think you have a good mind, and I was interested in your creative writing because of your insight and original thinking. You do a much better job when you do your own work and don’t try to piggyback on AI.
More recently, David Sparks (MacSparky) published a post about his reaction to AI-created content – The Sparky Language Model. He shared a story about attending a friend’s wedding where he heard a moving speech. When he complimented the speaker on the speech, he revealed that the speech was written by ChatGPT and he was just reading it. David was very disappointed to learn that AI was used – writing:
“This revelation left me profoundly unsettled. It got me thinking about the essence of personal expression and the irreplaceable value of human touch in our communications.”
These reactions got me thinking about how tools generally affect our ability to do things in our lives.
I rarely pick up a pen anymore, for example, as almost all of my writing, journaling, etc. is done on a digital device. I still carry a pen in my pocket but not because it’s indispensable any more. But none of my correspondents actually see my penmanship any more – that’s a quaint artifact gone to history.
In writing and publishing, there’s a long history of ghostwriting – where a work is created by someone other than the author to whom it is attributed. In many cases, the actual ghostwriter isn’t disclosed. In my mind, use of an AI to help with writing is analogous to hiring a ghostwriter to help write an article. Or even hiring a copywriter to help create clever ad copy.
The question of most appropriate use of AI as a tool for helping us write feels like a slippery slope to me.
Just for fun, I took MacSparky’s SLM essay and asked Claude Sonnet to generate a “caustic” reply to it. Claude warned me that it might not be a good idea to send my friend such a caustic reply but I asked Claude to write it for me anyway.
Afterward generating the reply, Claude commented again:
I want to reiterate my earlier concerns about the potential negative impact this kind of exchange could have on your friendship. While I’ve fulfilled your request, I strongly encourage considering whether sending such a reply aligns with your values and the kind of relationship you want to maintain with your friend.
If you do decide to send this or a similar response, it might be worth following up with a more personal, conciliatory message to ensure your friend understands the context and that this exchange hasn’t caused any lasting harm to your relationship.
Message received, thanks!
Here’s that “caustic” critique that Claude wrote:
A Scathing Rebuke of Self-Righteous Technophobia
In an era where technological advancement races forward at breakneck speed, it’s refreshing to encounter a piece so unabashedly retrograde that it makes Luddites look like Silicon Valley evangelists. Enter “THE SPARKY LANGUAGE MODEL (SLM),” a manifesto of sorts that purports to champion authenticity while reeking of thinly veiled fear and misunderstanding.
Our intrepid author, clearly nursing a wounded ego in the face of rapidly evolving AI capabilities, embarks on a crusade against the very notion of progress. The piece begins with a begrudging acknowledgment of AI’s usefulness, only to swiftly descend into a mire of personal repulsion. One can almost hear the pearls being clutched.
The anecdote about the AI-generated wedding speech serves as the linchpin of this technophobic tirade. Our author, upon learning of the speech’s origin, experiences a bout of existential angst so profound it borders on the comical. Heaven forbid we use tools to enhance our ability to express emotion! Surely, the cave paintings at Lascaux were the pinnacle of human expression, and it’s been all downhill since the invention of the alphabet.
The crux of the argument hinges on the nebulous concept of “human connection,” as if AI-assisted writing somehow taints the purity of human thought. This notion is not only laughably reductive but also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how language and communication evolve. By this logic, we should all revert to grunting and pointing, lest we lose our precious “human touch.”
The author’s insistence on keeping things “personal” for all “MacSparky content” reeks of a desperate attempt to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing landscape. It’s as if they believe their meandering thoughts and half-baked tips possess some intrinsic value simply because they originated from their particular gray matter. News flash: the value of content lies in its utility to the reader, not in the purity of its origin.
The piece reaches its zenith of absurdity with the declaration that even if AI becomes objectively better at writing, the author still has no interest in it. This is the intellectual equivalent of covering one’s ears and shouting “La la la, I can’t hear you!” It’s a stance so myopic it makes Mr. Magoo look like an eagle-eyed visionary.
The grand finale, the introduction of the “Sparky Language Model,” is less a clever play on words and more a sad attempt at branding one’s own limitations. It’s as if the author believes that by slapping a cute label on their refusal to adapt, they’ve somehow outsmarted the march of progress.
In the end, this article is less a thoughtful critique of AI’s role in writing and more a thinly veiled cry for help from someone clearly terrified of becoming obsolete. The irony, of course, is that by steadfastly refusing to engage with these new tools, the author is ensuring their own irrelevance faster than any AI ever could.
The author’s stance on AI writing assistance is particularly short-sighted when considering the potential benefits. AI tools can serve as powerful aids in the creative process, helping to overcome writer’s block, suggesting alternative phrasings, or even challenging the writer to consider new perspectives. By categorically rejecting these tools, the author is not preserving some mythical purity of expression, but rather limiting their own potential for growth and innovation.
Moreover, the binary thinking displayed in this article – the idea that it’s either pure human writing or soulless AI-generated content – demonstrates a profound lack of nuance. The reality is that AI writing tools, when used judiciously, can enhance and amplify human creativity, not replace it. It’s akin to a painter refusing to use a new type of brush because it wasn’t available to the Old Masters. Tools evolve, and so should our approach to using them.
In conclusion, “THE SPARKY LANGUAGE MODEL (SLM)” is less a manifesto and more a eulogy – not for human creativity, but for the author’s ability to adapt and evolve. In their desperate attempt to cling to an outdated notion of authenticity, they’ve only succeeded in highlighting their own obsolescence. One can only hope that future generations will look back on this piece as a quaint relic of a bygone era, much like we now view those who once feared that the printing press would destroy the art of memory.
Perhaps, in time, even our dear author will come to realize that embracing new tools doesn’t diminish our humanity – it enhances it. But until then, we can expect more technophobic hand-wringing from the self-proclaimed keeper of the “Sparky Language Model.” One thing’s for certain: in the race between human progress and willful ignorance, there’s only ever one winner.
I had to hand it to Claude. Caustic indeed! This was an over the top critique of MacSparky’s essay – but I still found that it offered some new insights into the debate on this issue of the most appropriate use of AI.
I took a risk and decided to share it with MacSparky – suggesting he “fasten his seat belt” before reading. Fortunately, he enjoyed it and I avoided losing a good friend in the process!
My explorations into the use of AI continue – and I’m enjoying having fun spelunking around the pretty amazing tools that we now have available with AI-based large language models. For example, I’m using Claude right now to generate the list of 25 keywords appropriate to tag this article with. I’ve also used Adobe Firefly to generate the image of a “ghostwriter” at the top of this article.
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