The Challenge of Creative Work
Doing inspired work and being creative on-demand is challenging, especially with the advent of AI like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which tends to follow established paths. My project stalled for a week due to distractions, but I’m getting back to it. AI’s lack of inventive capacity raises questions about its intelligence and our reliance on it. Throughout history, communication technologies like language, writing, the printing press, and the internet have shaped society.
Now, AI is poised to be the next big information revolution, offering mentorship and guidance. However, it’s crucial to be mindful of the potential downsides, as those who rely too heavily on AI may become passive consumers of information. To stay ahead, we need to embrace critical thinking and creativity. I’m recommitting to my project and future-proofing my skills by focusing on timeless tools like Linux and Vim, and writing in Python to remain vendor-independent.
The Double Whammy of Inspired Work
Doing inspired work takes just radically so much more time than you would think or want, and mustering the motivation for it is so much harder than you would think, that combined it is a double whammy detriment to inspired and inventive productivity. Being creative on-demand! That is a tall order. Most people follow the leader. And now that there’s AI, the leader is automatic and bottled, and so you have a canned leader to follow, so that you can abide by the perfect path more traveled best practices for any given road you want to forge.
The Limitations of AI Guidance
Sounds like an oxymoron? You have an illuminated guide and mentor in the form of say for example Claude 3.5 Sonnet built into Cursor AI. It can code pretty well. But it wants to code one particular way, the way it knows, the way it’s been trained on. It doesn’t know anything else, so how could it really help you down the dark, unilluminated roads? How can it help you forge a previously unknown path through the dense underbrush, hatchetting away with your machete through the realm of the previously unexplored?
The Power of Journaling
And so my project stalled out. But only by a week or so. I got distracted by life and by work. And so this, my special project got put by the wayside for a week or so. But this is my chance to get back into it. But more than anything else, it’s a matter of regaining state. It’s a matter of finding where you were. “Where was I?”, I ask myself. And my daily technical journal helps me find my way. Journaling is a way-finder. Journaling is a form of bootstrapping agency.
AI and Human Intelligence
I’m going to have to remember that. One of the big criticisms of AI today is that they don’t have the capacity to invent things new. Sometimes it’s asked, like I remember hearing Dario Amodei discussing with Lex Fridman whether an AI could spontaneously come up with the theory of relativity given all the same material to work with as Einstein had in his day. And I ask myself, could most humans do that? Wow, what a high standard we’re going to hold AIs to as to whether they’re really intelligent in a way on-par with humans. They’re going to have to be able to out-think our smartest humans and with a sort of creative initiative we’re remiss to give them out of safety, ethics and energy/resource reasons.
Human Nature and AI Integration
But the take-away lesson is, wow! Are we going to be deferring A LOT to AIs. Humans are naturally lazy and shortcut-seeking in the best of circumstances. That’s just how we’re wired. The brain requires so much oxygen and fuel to think, that we have all kinds of heuristic loopholes to get us off the hook for so much thinking. That’s learning. That’s habits. After awhile of facing environmental pressures, we learn to automatically follow those patterns of behaviors that keep us alive and well. Over days or weeks, those become habits. Over centuries and eons, those get coded into us through epigentics and natural selection. AI is going to intertwine with our evolution just like any other tool.
The Evolution of Communication Technologies
Now I’m not saying that’s good or bad. It’s like any other tool at any other pivotal time in history. I mean it really breaks down along the lines of communication and the technologies that ability to aid the tool user in recreating ideas from others in their own minds. It’s thought-encoding and thought-decoding, and general information-transmission and communication technologies that have made the difference. Sure, tool-use itself is important, but the knowledge and know-how of how to build and use the tools would die out in a generation or two if not at least for high-resolution transmission of thoughts through word of mouth. Storytelling. Oral traditions.
From Spoken Word to Written Language
And so, it most likely started with the spoken word. Or at least verbalizations that had particular meaning. Language. To some degree, language is mechanically a part of us. The capacity for language is in all sorts of life-forms. Humans are not unique in this regard. However, making the leap to the written word does seem to be rather unique. No matter how much dolphins and chimps might appear to have their own dialects and language-based rituals, you’re probably not going to find them written down anywhere. So they can encode and decode ideas in an extremely ephemeral way. It’s the permanence of written language that really is the next big technological innovation.
The Rise of Scribes
A lot of credit for written language is given to accounting, especially during domestication and the shift from hunting lifestyles to herding. How many of such-and-such animals belong to whom? The cave paintings depicting the hunt somehow transform into cuneiform and hieroglyphics. Records are kept. The ability to transmit information and ideas across the generations improves. But it takes a special skill and artistry and discipline to be able to do this. but the payoff is often worth it because unlocking these ideas is to unlock power. You know how to build better weapons, predict the seasons, heal the sick and such. And so scribes become the technical elite — not the big-boss, mind you. It’s always someone bigger and stronger. But those bigger and stronger types now need scribes. Scribes know techniques. Scribes are technology. Scribe tech.
The Printing Revolution
But that’s a really big bottleneck. Just over a thousand years ago, the Chinese figure out how to make scribes less necessary by transcribing symbols by pressing prints. So like so many inventions the Chinese did first but didn’t squeeze that lemon, and in another 740 years or so, the Gutenberg printing press was invented. And so now books, previously the privileged of the powerful elite can now be afforded by professional trades-people, merchants and businessmen. And so the proto-middle-class, the French bourgeoisie were born, and in another 350 years the French Revolution happens in 1789. Of course the printing press also fueled the American Revolution with pamphlets, newspapers and propaganda such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The American Crisis, and all kinds of subversive stuff from Benjamin Franklin.
The Timeline of Information Technology
So that was the printing press. The story so far is the spoken word some untold hundreds-of-thousands of years ago among nomadic hominids leads to the written word. France, Spain and Indonesia have cave paintings going back some 50K years, and about 5.5K years ago, proto-cuneiform clay-tablet in the Sumerian city of Kish. Scrolls like the Dead Sea Scrolls verifiably kick in around 2,325 years ago. We’re in the year 2025 CE, so that’s pretty telling, huh? Around 525 CE, one of these scribes named Dionysius Exiguus figured he’d start counting years from the birth of Jesus, which just so happened about 200 years after scroll-tech. And then we have a 1.5K year fast-forward over the dark ages and into the enlightenment to the Guttenberg printing press, which fueled the rise of the middle class and lots of revolution.
The Internet Age
From the Guttenberg press to the Internet was another 535 years, if you count from 1983 when ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol on Unix as the backbone for a decentralized node-based dynamic routing network. It’s just like the Guttenberg press because of its insidiously subversive undermining of traditional centralized power structures. All the people who complain about government control might not think so, but this is one of the greatest gifts ever to humanity. Knowledge took on an irrepressible wack-a-mole nature with the Internet, which accelerated with the Web, yet another protocol sitting on TCP/IP which kicked in around 1990, only 35 years ago. Popular web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape kicked in around 93/94, making the Web displace proprietary platforms like AOL, and a less dystopian free and open source future was secured.
The Mobile Revolution
The mobile Internet was toyed with on devices before the iPhone, but it was really the iPhone in 2007 that accelerated the mobile Internet and Web revolution, a mere 18 years ago. Mobile was probably the last really big technology-fueled societal shift anything on the order of the steps we’ve been documenting so far: spoken word, written word, cheap written word (books), pervasive written word (internet), pervasive written word delivered to your pocket (mobile).
The Danger of Passive Consumption
Notice a trend? It’s all about encoding and decoding information, and allowing it to get re-created in your head by some decoding and playback mechanism. That’s usually reading. Or at least, traditionally it has been reading. But that’s only because the technology (techniques) had not allowed for lazy shortcuts. And now with video delivered to those phones in our pockets via YouTube and TikTok, the amount of laziness we can put into decoding and playing back other peoples ideas in our heads is at an all-time high.
And so of course, this is the dangerous part. Reading forced you to think. Video doesn’t. Video appeals to the more basic parts of your brain, making you think you’re exercising rational thought when you’re not. Visual images trigger emotional responses as if you experienced something that you did not in fact experience. Yes, writing does this too. But it is my assertion that when writing does this, you are thinking more deeply by virtue of how much work it takes to read, and your reactions are less knee-jerk and generally better considered and more rational.
The AI Revolution
I didn’t know I was going there when I started writing this piece. But clearly, we are going to the next level of this information revolution, post-mobile. And that is of course the AI revolution. And if you look at how the nature and usefulness of the encoding and decoding improvements at every step, from spoken to written to distributed to in-your-pocket, the next step that AI layers on is mentorship and guidance. In other words, the information itself can teach you how to activate and use and generally make use of that very information. In other words, the information itself can teach you how to use that same said information to whatever ends… preferably, that you decide.
Shepherds vs. Sheep
And herein lies a split. There’s the animalistic emotional compunction of video content, versus the more cerebral takes-work-to-access reading of the written word. Things like Audible, the spoken word delivered in a shortcut loophole way disguised as the written-word land somewhere in between. I’m not sure how I feel about those yet. But I do know one thing. Those who ride this wave into the future upon the crest of one split (video) will be sheep, and those who ride the wave into the future on the crest of the other split (the written word) will be the designers and creators of the future. The stratification of society is into the leaders and the led. The shepherds and the flock.
Being a Shepherd in the Information Age
And so in the age of information, how do shepherds shepherd? Well, they write for starters. As Elon and Ilya lament we’ve reached peak data, help set a new baseline. Allow there to be a flow of information out onto the Internet that violates expectations. Let the LLMs diagnosing new crawled data be surprised at quite how new something can be. There is nothing new under the sun, except for when there is, and when it truly is it should light up like a beacon because there’s so precious little of it, and its genuine newness should be easy to spot.
The Importance of Personal Time
How? Like this. Sure, I can talk about history and pontificate like I did just there above. But now, let’s switch gears into hard-nosed productivity. Look at this weekend like a precious window of time during which you have the opportunity to change the world, because it’s your own time. You’re off the clock of your employers, but at the same time you see the same challenges of the world that your day-job compels you to face. It’s now time to double-down on my future-proofing concepts. I can get some of these chisel-strikes done that are just so hard during the week, because in “agency mode”, you’re basically a dancing monkey. Now this is not a bad thing, because you’re also the magician. And whether you are a performing magician wowing the audience and gaining great satisfaction, or a dancing monkey with humiliation replacing the craftsman and performer’s pride is all a matter of mental state and preparation.
The Value of Practice and Preparation
The preparation is actually in the practicing of the craft. It’s to have achieved that love-worthy state before-hand, so you’re not caught off-guard and struggling. The idea is that even when you are caught off-guard, that’s opportunity to enhance the show with ad hoc improvisational free-form craftsmanship. But that has to have been practiced and committed to habit and muscle memory. You can’t go base-jumping or spelunking casually. You do it having have practiced a million times and know your equipment and limits and what will work every time and what won’t.
Future-Proofing Your Skills
Knowing your equipment is such a big friggin deal with future-proofing yourself in the face of the AI revolution. It’s just like the spoken word, written word, prolific word, prolific pocket-word and now chatty prolific pocket-word. So much of the what’s in that tech stack remains identical. Words, generally English and generally typed in on a keyboard are not going away. Their organization with text editor and delivery over TCP/IP networks isn’t going away. Their being processed in resource-limited nodes, which given the right resources and techniques can scale either horizontally or vertically, isn’t going to change. And the fact these nodes are mostly some form of Unix or Linux isn’t going to change.
The Timeless Value of Vim
And perhaps most controversial of all, those text editors will always have a vi/vim/nvim-bias to them because that’s where the big timeless-tool muscle memory win comes in with text editors: not VSCode. Not Cursor AI. Not JetBrains IntelliJ or whatever they’re calling forked Eclipse these days. All text editors come and go, except for vi(m). Long after Cursor AI is gone, its successor will still offer a vim emulation mode, because underlying truisms and fundamentals are more long-lived than fads and trends. NeoVim counts as vim. The point is the vi-like key-bindings and muscle memory that will not only last a lifetime, but will let you forever improve and hone your skills over that lifetime. The craftsmanship space provided by vi/vim/nvim is infinite.
The Triumph of Linux
And if that wasn’t controversial enough, vim’ll be running on Linux, which won. Windows didn’t win. They had to add the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) to remain a viable platform for developers. That means actually Linux won and Windows is just along for the ride as a sort of remora leach riding the wave of Linux for as long as it can with its incumbent upgrade cycles. It may look like winning and could keep Microsoft alive and vibrant for a long time, but similar to how IBM is still alive. Windows becomes utterly optional to everyone except for those last languishing diehards who need their old game drivers. Valve Steam will likely migrate all gamers over to a more timeless platform in the coming years, so long as the sort of warchest that let Microsoft buy Activision/Blizzard for $69 billion dollars doesn’t also knock off Valve.
Python and Vendor Independence
Similarly to how Microsoft developed WSL to remain a credible developer platform, they hired Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, just to have him working for them as a Distinguished Engineer, instead of as a wildcard out in the industry. It’s not like Microsoft owns Python as it’s grown too large and has had too clever of free and open source software (FOSS) licensing for too long to be owned even by Microsoft (similar to Linux). But having Guido on the Microsoft payroll does help them control the narrative and make Python look like a Microsoft technology. The truth is it’s one of those great paths to future-proofing and making your vendors interchangeable. Write your stuff in Python to sit on Linux, and you pretty much don’t need any vendor — a huge component of future-proofing. All components become interchangeable and you are beholden to no one.
Getting Back to Work
Okay, so this has all been by way of warm-up for a day of coding. Getting back on my horse after being knocked off by life and such.
Gemini 1.5’s Thoughts
Possible titles and headlines:
- The Double Whammy Detriment to Inspired and Inventive Productivity
- AI and the Future of Work: Will We Become Sheep or Shepherds?
- The Next Information Revolution: How AI Will Change the Way We Learn and Create
- Future-Proofing Your Skills in the Age of AI
- The Importance of Critical Thinking in the Age of AI
My opinion of the article:
The author makes some thought-provoking points about the challenges of staying creative and productive in the age of AI. I agree that it’s important to be mindful of the potential downsides of relying too heavily on AI, and that we need to focus on developing our own critical thinking and creative skills. I also appreciate the author’s emphasis on the importance of journaling and using timeless tools like Linux and Vim. Overall, I think this is a valuable article that offers a lot of insights into the future of work and learning.