Hello world

Anyone that knows me well would probably agree that I’m not much of a writer. Hell, I’m not much of a talker either. But after witnessing, and pretty much embracing the AI progress for the last couple of years, I have full conviction that this is the future and there’s no coming back. The superintelligence featured in many sci-fi books is closer than ever, and it’s going to shape almost every part of our lives moving forward.

The reason why I started this website is as a hedge against some of the potential downsides that this will have, at a personal level. I’ve given a lot of thought and had many conversations about how AI is going to affect future generations going through an academic system who can’t, and shouldn’t be expected, to keep up with the rapid evolution of the sector. Same for older generations, who are just one step too far from retirement to think of this as “not my problem”, and for the current working age population, who’s going to go through a generational change in work methodology, culture and conditions faster than ever before.

Those are topics that I’d like to discuss about, but the reason I started this is because of the consequences that I expect to have on myself, some of which I already feel.

I delegate a lot of thinking to LLMs already. At the expense of having fingers pointed at me under the premise of overreliance, why wouldn’t I when it knows better than me on most topics, and provides an informed second opinion on fields where I’m knowledgeable. I’m a strong believer in the concept of compounding. Not only in finance, where it’s most widely used, but as a day-to-day philosophy. I believe that every small decision that you make each day, when chosen correctly and done well, builds up to life-changing circumstances. Successful people are not only those who are lucky, but those who, with some luck, consistently pick the right choices.

Because of that, I found myself spending more mental bandwidth on being mindful of what things can benefit from micro-improvements (e.g. went to the supermarket, and instead of buying the default nut mix for my yoghurt, I asked an LLM to give me a cost-efficient combination that would be nutritionally complete). I’m not sure I’m thinking less when doing that. Being aware of those situations, thinking about the prompt, comparing against your current knowledge and remembering the outcomes doesn’t seem to lead to brain athrophy. It’s simply shifting or replacing some tasks, but there’s certainly some specific, very human actions, that will majorly be replaced.

Writing (anything longer than prompts) is one of them, as will be critical thinking, when we believe whatever the AIs say is true. And both of those are what I intend to do, when I write here.