(1) “Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work”
Why making something less costly leads to output explosion rather than time savings:
By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don’t even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn’t have been started, the contracts that wouldn’t have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn’t have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn’t have been launched otherwise.
(2) “On Facing Extinction (Again)”
On the decline of journalism as a profession and (possible) parallels with software engineering:
Newspapers used to have subject matter experts, fact checkers, embedded reporters, and probably another dozen roles I’d never heard of because they were gone by the time I got into the trade. Similarly, an engineering team has frontend and backend experts, devOps, appsec engineers, support engineers (ideally), UX, and so on - not to mention doc writers, developer advocates, etc., which you don’t need if you’re just building an app for your local restaurant, but presumably some people will still make software they want to sell. Will we get to a place where those experts only exist in dying institutions that we call FAANG today?
(3) “Reflections on Vibe Researching”
On opportunities and perils of LLM-assisted research:
AI is really useful, and the latest models leave o1-pro well in the dust. It definitely accelerates research. But at the same time, it has only made me more cognisant of the human factor in research. By shutting people (including myself) out of the research process, I left myself open to pushing lower-quality ideas, which the review process itself clearly surfaced.
(4) “The rise of the disinformation-for-hire industry”
The consequences of outsourced, mass-produced misinformation:
The emergence of (…) influence-for-hire firms has created a new strategic imbalance – asymmetrical information warfare.
In this asymmetry, autocracies enjoy maximum reach with minimal risk. At home, they are protected by censorship, control, and deniability. Democracies, however, are more exposed. Bound by transparency and law, they face maximum vulnerability with limited defences.