Please Do Not Optimize the Humans
Bill Gates, lifelong champion of efficiency, now argues that some human work may be worth protecting precisely because it cannot—and should not—be optimized.
Work & Economy
32posts
AI for Everyone. Then Came the Token Bill.
Cut enterprise AI costs with smarter model routing, leaner context, prompt caching, bounded agents and task-appropriate file formats.
Degrees, Drills and Algorithms: Rethinking Education in the Age of AI
AI is reshaping the value of degrees and apprenticeships, rewarding adaptable people who combine critical thinking, practical skills and human judgment.
The Museum of Recent Intelligence
Machines do not have to think like us to change our lives. A visit to tomorrow’s AI museum asks what happens while we are still arguing over the word AGI on X.
Think of the Children - and Please Sign Here
AI’s prophets discover job loss when it reaches PowerPoint. A four-sentence manifesto demands action—while carefully avoiding who must act, and how.
The Trillion-Dollar Tenant
Apple’s lawsuit exposes OpenAI’s IPO dilemma: a trillion-dollar AI tenant built on rented compute, borrowed infrastructure and highly mobile talent.
Ten Jobs Whose Current Form Deserves a Farewell Party
A sharp look at which white-collar roles AI may not merely change, but quietly make obsolete, and why polite language hides the scale of the shift.
The Man Who Looked at TSMC and Thought: Fine, I’ll Build My Own
Musk's chip-factory ambition becomes a case study in impatience, vertical integration, and the difference between strategy decks and industrial action.
The Fragmentation of Knowledge Work
Anthropic's labor research suggests AI is not replacing whole jobs so much as fragmenting knowledge work task by task.
The Laptop Rule and the White-Collar Delusion
The laptop class may be more exposed to AI than it admits, because text-heavy office work is exactly where models thrive.
The Hidden Cost of AI Speed: Why “More Output” Feels Like Burnout
AI speed can create exhaustion rather than relief when output accelerates but judgment, review, and responsibility remain human.
The Hidden Toll of AI in the Workplace
Behind efficiency promises, workplace AI may reshape pressure, monitoring, and cognitive load in ways managers prefer not to measure.
Resulting, not consulting
Traditional consulting is attacked as performance without results, with AI exposing how much of the industry was polished busywork.
A Gigawatt of Compute: Why xAI’s Colossus 2 Matters
xAI's Colossus 2 announcement is less about one data center than about the escalating geopolitics and economics of compute.
The Tool Is Not the Craft
AI adoption fails when organizations confuse access to tools with mastery of the craft needed to use them responsibly.
AI Didn’t Kill Office Work — It Exposed It
Generative AI did not invent office busywork; it made the fakery cheaper, faster, and much harder to deny.
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) 1.0: A New Licensing Foundation for the AI-First Web
RSL 1.0 proposes a machine-readable licensing layer for the AI web, giving publishers a clearer way to state usage terms.
AI Consulting for SMEs: Practical Guidance, Real Impact
A practical consulting offer for SMEs that want AI adoption grounded in strategy, automation, risk management, and working systems.
Elon Musk's Vision: Turning Tesla's Idle Fleet into a Global AI Inference Powerhouse
Musk's idea of using idle Teslas for inference turns a car fleet into a provocative vision of distributed AI infrastructure.
Europe's Exascale Extravaganza: A Supercomputer Saga of Red Tape, Rivalry, and Reluctant Reliance
Europe's Jupiter supercomputer is impressive, but the post asks whether regulation and dependency will blunt its strategic value.
AGI and Global Finance: Abundance and Instability
If AGI makes money less meaningful, why are AI companies raising so much of it? The contradiction becomes the story.
The AI Bubble: Parallels to the Dot-Com Era and Beyond
The AI boom is compared with dot-com excess, asking which parts are durable infrastructure and which are speculative heat.
Implications of AGI for Universal Basic Income
AGI forces a hard look at universal basic income when work may no longer be society's main distribution mechanism.
Unveiling AI’s Environmental Footprint: What We’re Measuring, What We’re Saving, and How to Ship Greener
AI's environmental cost is real, but so are possible savings; the post argues for honest accounting rather than slogans.
AI: The Grand Illusion Fueling America's Economic Mirage
AI hype is framed as an economic mirage, propping up confidence while hiding fragile assumptions beneath the spectacle.
OpenAI's $1 ChatGPT Deal for the Federal Government: Philanthropy or Power Play?
OpenAI's one-dollar federal deal looks generous, but it also plants ChatGPT deep inside public-sector workflows.
Are We Losing a Generation of Experts to AI?
AI may erase entry-level rungs before young professionals can build expertise, creating a hidden generational risk.
The Great Saturation: When Markets, Minds, and Machines Hit Their Limits
Saturation appears across markets, research, and models, revealing what happens when growth hits limits and novelty thins out.
The AI Gold Rush Just Got Interesting: How China's DeepSeek R1 is Giving Silicon Valley a Run for Its (Literal) Money
DeepSeek R1 disrupts the AI cost narrative, challenging Silicon Valley's assumption that frontier capability requires extravagant spending.
The New Free Lunch Is Over: Parallels Between CPU Evolution and AI Development
AI faces its own version of the end of the free lunch, where growth runs into energy, hardware, and efficiency limits.
The Jevons Effect and the Rise of Large Language Models: A Modern Paradox
The Jevons paradox explains why more efficient AI may increase total consumption rather than reduce costs or energy use.
A Comparative Analysis of Aleph Alpha and OpenAI: Divergent Paths in the AI Landscape
Aleph Alpha and OpenAI are compared as two very different strategies in the market for language models.