Bits and Bobs 3/16/2026

Karri Saarinen laid out the hypothetical. But as work becomes AI-enabled, token usage is emerging as a proxy for productivity. The more tokens you burn, the more you're perceived as producing. I've heard investors say that token consumption is one way to measure how "AI-native" a startup is or how much staying power they have.

The winner in this economy is the foundation model company making money on token usage. They've successfully aligned their business model with maximizing productive outcomes.

I wonder if we'll see a similar trend as we did when we started thinking more employees equals more output. Will the measure flip from "how many tokens can you burn?" to "how little token usage can you achieve for how much outcome?"

When Dario or anyone else compares AI to nuclear weapons, they're making a political argument whether they know it or not.

They're saying: this should be proprietary, centralized, controlled by a small number of trusted actors.

But a nuclear bomb has no neutral use case. AI has thousands. The analogy breaks down immediately, but by the time it breaks down, it's already done its work. The framing has already foreclosed the open, distributed path.

Buchanan's "artifactual man" imagines the self as something we construct through experimentation. Digital platforms now mediate that construction: without a data representation, you arguably don't exist in the relevant sense.

The locus of control matters: are we ceding authorship of our artifactual selves to "monarchs of the digital realm" who operate under a myth of benevolence while serving self-interest?

Reframing: if the individual controlled their own data aggregation, owning and curating their digital self, does the dynamic change? Does personal data sovereignty restore the freedom to "become the man you want to become"?