The immediacy era

AI apps give us a ton of text in exchange for a single sentence question
tiktok-style apps figure out your algorithm based just swipes or very little input
conclusion: we live in an era where the ratio between the output you get from the input you provide is massive. this creates a feeling of immediacy and expectations from every other discipline or industry, whether or not that ratio applies
this also creates a false illusion of implicit knowledge, specially for things that only exist within your mind. the feedback loops and echo chambers these services provide can shape people into being more opaque, less comprehensible. this will be paired with the consequential feeling of “being misunderstood” because everyone else is stupid. if it’s so obvious to me (and to these systems), why would anyone else find it hard to understand?
when people use chatgpt, the response is inherently biased towards the question. this is also true for google. it’s not the same to ask for “is X wrong” than to ask “why is X wrong”. the latter already implies that X is indeed wrong, and we want to know why. this will return pages that talk about why X is wrong.
this is enhanced in LLMs, where now you don’t have to sort through various articles, where, at least, you know where you’re getting the information from, and even if answering an already biased question, you’re contrasting several pieces of information.
LLMs are great at providing “good enough”. good enough is more than enough to pass as truth when you don’t really care. this is like an insanely powerful echo chamber.
in general, AI startups et al. usually strive for “making things for everyone” and so that “everyone” can do anything. whether they succeed or not is not important, but the message is. this immediacy also creates urgency to be able to now do something that would otherwise take a lot of time.
the idea is to compress time, or the knowledge to be able to perform some complex action. as if, we needed absolutely everyone in every age bracket to be able to create a b2b saas from scratch.
hard things take time and are valuable for the time they hold just in their mere existence. trying to compress this is like mistaking the orange for the juice. you cannot
hard things take time on two levels:
- the actual time it takes to create and polish
- the time the creator has invested in their whole life to reach their level of mastery
- these are things that cannot be compressed
new tools may emerge that can make work easier to make. farmer → machinery, writing → typing. ai → coding ≠ programming
the main narrative is that being competent is no longer something to strive for, if you can just “get something done”. “you don’t need to learn or know how this works”. then, maybe, and only maybe, whatever that discipline is, is not for you.
opinion: this is a sign of disrespect to the discipline in hand. craftmanship is not about the outcome, but the process. following a careful and thoughtful process just happens to produce incredible outcomes.
it’s also easy to think in terms of outcome, in terms of “what you will get” or “where you will arrive”. no one wants to walk the path to that place anymore. we just want to be there already. now.