I don’t know if this is right or not but I know that there’s an anxiousness out there shared by millions wondering the same thing, with or without the words. I think it boils down to colon: are we in the process of accidentally erasing what gives life meaning? And not just for knowledge workers, though I think sometimes we talk about it as if that’s the bull’s-eye. But more broadly.
Agree. I suspect you saw the piece in the NYT that Meghan O'Rourke wrote about writing and LLMs. She really gets to the tension involved in examining what we lose at every stage of the writing process, with the great context that it is writing—making sense of this great experiment of living—that offers the meaning.
There is a lot in this post. I have gone down this line of inquiry at several different stages of my life…then I moved to Italy. Italy is the embodiment of that friction. Occasionally the friction brings value to my life, but the vast majority of times it doesn’t. That said, there is a significant amount of space between Silicon Valley optimization and Italian or even European friction. Not surprisingly my best experience with friction is the friction I create for myself and not that imposed on me.
J- Really appreciate your thoughts on this topic and agree with your diagnosis. I’ve enjoyed hearing Kyla Scanlon’s ideas about the value of friction in an AI economy and Kate Bowler’s recent writing about the search for purpose and meaning in our modern moment. You’re likely up to speed on them, but worth checking out if not.
"Intelligence works for an orderly world, for weak-link problems. Only wisdom works for a chaotic world, for strong-link problems." This idea. It explains so much about this moment.
I don’t know if this is right or not but I know that there’s an anxiousness out there shared by millions wondering the same thing, with or without the words. I think it boils down to colon: are we in the process of accidentally erasing what gives life meaning? And not just for knowledge workers, though I think sometimes we talk about it as if that’s the bull’s-eye. But more broadly.
Agree. I suspect you saw the piece in the NYT that Meghan O'Rourke wrote about writing and LLMs. She really gets to the tension involved in examining what we lose at every stage of the writing process, with the great context that it is writing—making sense of this great experiment of living—that offers the meaning.
There is a lot in this post. I have gone down this line of inquiry at several different stages of my life…then I moved to Italy. Italy is the embodiment of that friction. Occasionally the friction brings value to my life, but the vast majority of times it doesn’t. That said, there is a significant amount of space between Silicon Valley optimization and Italian or even European friction. Not surprisingly my best experience with friction is the friction I create for myself and not that imposed on me.
J- Really appreciate your thoughts on this topic and agree with your diagnosis. I’ve enjoyed hearing Kyla Scanlon’s ideas about the value of friction in an AI economy and Kate Bowler’s recent writing about the search for purpose and meaning in our modern moment. You’re likely up to speed on them, but worth checking out if not.
I think you're onto something. I came at it from a different angle here: https://betterletter.substack.com/p/strong-link-problems
"Intelligence works for an orderly world, for weak-link problems. Only wisdom works for a chaotic world, for strong-link problems." This idea. It explains so much about this moment.