The Philosopher's Invitation
the paradoxical antidote to our AI woes
Hello intersectional thinkers 👋
Greetings from the Dreamliner headed to Auckland, NZ 🇳🇿
Looking out at the blanket of fluffy clouds conjures up a very niche image:
Doraemon and Nobita are kicking it back, getting away from the everyday troubles of a Japanese elementary school kid life.
Doraemon was my first encounter with science fiction.
This Japanese robot cat had a pocket filled with cool gadgets - like an ‘anywhere door’ (どこでもドア) that can take you literally anywhere, and these ‘bamboo copters’ (タケコプター) that took everyone to the clouds.
I always dreamt of having my own Doraemon.
Pragmatic little me was even happy to settle for just one gadget - preferably the bamboo copter so I too can retreat to the clouds as needed.
Maybe because I have been waiting for friendly robots and tech all my life to expand my human abilities, now that it’s here, I’m surprised not more people share my hopeful excitement.
I first noticed this at Google.
The tech-savvy’s search for the hard life
Life at Google was pretty exciting. Good pay, free food, lots of tech and big and fun problems to solve all day.
Everything is possible. Yet many Googlers weren’t happy.
They dreamt of doing something different. Something tangible. Something that’s real. Hard. Ideally in the physical world.
Like starting a coffee shop by the beach.
Gardening.
Build a cabin in the woods to read old books and write pen to paper.
The trend was consistent. (I dreamt of a version of all three too)
Perhaps because we rest by doing the opposite of what we do at work. If we look at a screen all day, then naturally we reach for life outside of the screen to recharge our energy.
It’s easy to chalk this phenomenon up to another story about burnout.
But when we dig a few layers deeper, we’ll find Viktor Frankl waving his hands, warning us of this symptom pointing to a problem much more fundamental:
"In the past, nothing was possible but everything was meaningful; today, everything is possible but nothing is meaningful." - Viktor Frankl
And meaning is what we lack.
The Agent Principal Problem revisited
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger
Our existential crisis occupied more of our mind since we started working for others in the industrial age.
When we ceased to toil for ourselves and worked collectively towards something bigger, something at scale in the financial sense, the classic economic tension arose between:
- the principal (e.g., business owners, shareholders, authority figures who appoint others to act on their behalf), and
- the agent (e.g., employees, managers), who are supposed to act on the principal’s behalf, but may have different goals or misaligned incentives.
And since principals want to make sure the agents are doing what they are hired to do, companies:
break work into repeatable, monitorable tasks
train agents (humans) to be predictable and efficient.
use KPIs, OKRs, SOPs and other wonderful 3 letter acronyms to track and optimize performance
And to make sure we prepare the next generation to do the same, we have standardized tests that assigned more value to those who are more able to follow these instructions.
We've been training machine-shaped humans. (Feeling like a “cog“ in the bigger machine.)
And while we got good scale out of this model, we’ve really outdone ourselves with the perfect (AI) agent in recent years.
AI - the Dream Agent
AI Agents’ ability to follow (Principal’s) instructions, perform efficiently, increasingly predictably, and human-like is fueling our existential crisis.
And what’s worse for human agents - our AI ‘counterpart’ thrive on micro-management. The more you can define boundaries and limitations, give it detailed instructions on what you want and don’t want, the better it'll perform.
That’s great news for Principals who want to make sure their vision gets executed.
Because if we look closer, the existential crisis is not happening to humanity as a whole.
Agents are more threatened by artificial intelligence than Principals.
Principals - those who appoint others to act on their behalf - are happy to leverage a faster, cheaper, more effective version of ‘someone’ to get things done. Humans. AI. Humans assisted by AI. All great choices for different use cases.
Agents - those who act on someone else’s behalf - lose leverage since there are more ‘agents’, who can do more, and Principals love them for embracing overly detailed explanations with an upbeat “That’s a great insight!”.
Paradoxically, human Agents don't have agency to make room for themselves in this new AI Agent-filled world.
We have trained people to act like machines, and machines to think like humans.
We’ve succeeded in both. So what now?
A philosophical renaissance
Philosophy will be back in vogue.
Because we've advanced so far with science, the favourite twin to philosophy, that our problems are no longer "How can we do X?".
Rather, our modern dilemma is "I can do many things. But what should I do?!"
What makes work meaningful?
What makes life human?
These will be the questions we are forced to answer now that AI is here.
Our answers at this point in time are still premature.
Too reactionary. Dualistic.
Because AI makes work seem easy and effortless, some suggest the way to make work meaningful again is to do work the hard way.
Read The Obstacle Is the Way.
Learn the abacus.
Write a world changing book.
All wonderful things to do. But does the ease of vibe coding remove meaning from the desire to create an app? Does choosing to write a hard book automatically make the effort meaningful?
Effort exerted is just a proxy because we believe in meritocracy and the ideal that if I work hard, I will reap rewards.
But we also know that’s not always how the world works.
Sometimes we work hard, but our efforts go in vain.
Sometimes things look easy. Even lazy. But the ease came from someone investing their entire life to make it look easy.
There is virtue in hard work as much as in elegant effortlessness.
From Aristotle to Confucius, living a virtuous life meant deliberate action.
But in Renaissance humanism's sprezzatura and Taoism's wuwei, the highest form of action is effortless action.
Be like water, as Bruce Lee said.
If we really want to get into the paradoxical nature of hard and easy work, leisure in Greek actually meant learning.
So all this hard reading and writing in a hermit cabin many of us dream of is paradoxically doing the leisurely thing.
Hustling to make money with an ChatGPT wrapper? Now that takes true discipline and hard work.
But all this is just philosophical technicalities.
Depending on what you strive for. You have the choice.
The problem for most people is that choice.
We have the freedom to do both. But we don't know how to choose.
Freedom is not free
We now have the freedom we say we crave.
Technology gives us superpowers that expand our intelligence and capabilities beyond what we imagined possible.
We can:
Code without knowing how to code
Start a business without hiring a team
Write a book without staring at a blank page
Learn any topic with a personalized tutor for free
Yet instead of diving into the projects we’ve been wanting to do, many are paralyzed.
The infinity of choices brought anxiety:
The aspiring writer who could write anything now spends hours deciding what to write about
The entrepreneur who could start any business now cycles through possibilities without committing
The artist who could create in any medium now doubts which path is "authentic"
The professional who could pivot into any career now fears choosing the "wrong" direction
The student who could learn anything now struggles to decide what's worth learning
Because as Jean Paul Sartre sharply pointed out:
"There is no trace out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him."
And for Agents trained on predictability and replaceability, having agency restored is jarring.
The very freedom we dreamed of becomes our biggest challenge. We are afraid of the responsibility freedom brings.
Free and responsible. Without excuses.
To be accountable to our own hopes and dreams is a paradigm shift for Agents.
Because Principals used to bear the responsibility. And Agents can blame everything wrong in their lives on everyone else but themselves.
It made sense. Because they were a part of a bigger system that was consciously designed to disincentivize agency that misaligned with the Principals.
But now Agents are invited to be Principals of their own lives.
Yet many of us don't have the human skills to step into this foreign and free role.
How many of us can deal with uncertainty? Exercise judgement? Care? How many of us secretly crave the safety and certainty created by someone else so we don’t have to think about it?
The philosopher's invitation
"So what does it means to be human?"
We will have to come up with our own answer at this point.
Not a fast answer.
Not an answer someone else tells us to recite.
Each of us will need to come up with our own answer. Because we will know when it's not right for us.
We all have to engage in this philosophical exercise whether we want to or not.
Red pill or blue pill?
Vicky