43 chunks · 14 episodes
We've been living in the era of the knowledge worker. Peter Drucker called this shift originally. We just assume this is the natural way of the world. Of course the best jobs are knowledge work, and always will be. But now LLMs can do cognitive labor at an unimaginable scale. …Maybe knowledge work w
People are afraid of being under the API of AI. But we've been under the API of money for a very long time. AI mainly supercharges that. But it also democratizes access to cognitive labor.
Earlier versions of computers didn't reduce cognitive labor, they just required humans to do a new kind of cognitive labor. But LLMs can now truly handle it. But only if they have the context of your life and you trust them to act as an extension of you.
The bullshit cognitive labor crowds out the meaningful labor. If you didn't have as much bullshit cognitive labor, you could do more of the stuff you find meaningful. Like proactively sending a hand-written letter to people you care about.
LLMs are really good at rebasing.[c] Rebasing normally is tedious and error-prone. A form of cognitive labor that dominates the development of software. But LLMs can handle it well.
The value of teams of people has declined. It used to be a few things: 1) More perspectives to make it more likely that collaborative debate would produce a great result. 2) More bodies to execute the vision faster. It used to not be possible to spin up patient, knowledgeable people to do cognitive
What is the strategic staying power of our Google Accounts? It used to be too much of a pain to extract our data into other services. But now LLMs could plausibly do the cognitive labor given a Google Takeout dump. The thing that would be hardest to leave is changing your gmail address for thousands
I heard of someone using ChatGPT to handle a litigious ex-spouse. The ex-spouse has more disposable income than him, so she has been extremely litigious in bad faith to cost him as much as possible. Even for mundane details of child care. He switched to using ChatGPT to advise him. His prompt is: "r
Cognitive labor is a means not an end. You just want to not have to think about it. As long as you trust the system will do a good enough job, you don't have to worry about it. "Cognitive labor" means "I don't care how it gets done as long as it gets done.
Tasks often require "intelligence tokens." A unit of attention from a sufficiently-intelligent actor. Before, most cognitive labor tasks required a human. Human intelligence tokens are quite expensive. Not only do you have to find and train the human, but you need to pay them continuously, keep them
Another thing abundant cognitive labor can be applied to: navigating government bureaucracy.
...wing export while actually making it as difficult as possible. But LLMs provide abundant cognitive labor. They can make sense of any infodump, no matter how disorganized. For example, Gemini's import is just a prompt.
...so you only did them if something actually went wrong. But now LLMs can provide abundant cognitive labor, so we can have LLMs make futros cheaply and catch problems before they happen.
...work. Getting the right mise en place is a lot of cognitive labor. LLMs provide abundant cognitive labor.
What if things that fell through the cracks instead were lifted up? That's impossible when it takes patience and focus at all times. But it's possible when cognitive labor becomes abundant and cheap.
LLMs do for cognitive labor what electricity did for manual labor. A lot of tasks don't make sense when they have to be done manually. But if you get abundant labor, suddenly what's worth doing changes. A lot of stuff we cared about wasn't worth doing before, because it was too expensive. Now, in a
A compounding social technology for an organization: blameless post mortems[bh]. The default assumption is it's no individual's fault, it's the system's fault.[bi] This means people have no incentive to hide what really happened. When it's laid bare, it's easy to see how to improve the system to avo
Bullshit work is exhausting. Cognitive labor.
...r to help manifest their intentions in the world. But now all of us can marshal abundant cognitive labor. But a family office made by someone else would be deeply icky because of the Principal Agent problem. So instead of a service building one for you, ...
When your head, heart, and gut are in full alignment it's resonant. Head is about logic. Heart is about values. Gut is about intuition. When you're able to steelman any argument, your head can lead you astray. LLMs make this even more powerful a possible tool… and distraction. Now with AI making cog