an uneasy feeling about the future

the future used to feel like an abundance of opportunity and the world would be at my fingertips. although the latter feels closer than ever, it feels as though the former moves further away.

as society continues to advance the frontier of AI, I continue to realize an exponentially increasing gap between the future of the workforce and what our education system can provide for us. I see my friends and family lulled into a feeling of readiness. at the same time, I see those who are already in the workforce being replaced left and right. what does the future look like for our youth?

we have never seen a technology like this before. previous industrial revolutions amplified muscle, speed, coordination, but never truly cognition. when thinking becomes cheap and abundant as it’s becoming now, the baseline value of many forms of labor compresses. if a system can draft, analyze, code, model, design, and reason at near zero marginal cost, knowledge alone is no longer a limiting factor, and execution is no longer defensible.

what remains scarce is judgment. direction. taste. humanity.

society is still calibrated for a world where information is expensive and where human labor is the bottleneck. we continue to train students for this kind of environment while simultaneously destabilizing entire categories of work in months with every new progression in AI.

i probably sound too doomerish. it’s quite possible that the future becomes radically abundant for some. when intelligence is amplified, the productive capacity of society could expand beyond what anyone has imagined. entire industries could be rebuilt around near-instant iteration. scientific discovery could compress. entrepreneurship is already scaling with a handful of people and compute.

i’m just afraid that those who are not realizing this soon enough may find themselves stuck with no way to catch up to society.

so perhaps the question is not whether opportunity exists, but whether we can reorient quickly enough and if we can shift education toward first principles thinking and moral reasoning.

rishabh