People are terrible at valuing things independently, they tend outsource their sense of value to social signals. That’s why follower counts and clout are so sought after.
The future I envisioned was one where technology improved people’s lives. It improved our quality of life. It connected us. It helped cure and prevent diseases.
Instead, what I’m seeing play out is that humans are being eaten first, while we’re fed a utopian fantasy of a world where we won’t have to work and will live well. I’m not buying it.
Almost everything happening right now tells me this is a hopeful expectation, not an inevitability.
I’m not seeing the human character traits that will bring that about.
What’s inside of you matters way more than what is outside. Take care of what’s inside, curate carefully what you take in; things happening outside are products of what’s happening inside.
I had this thought/feeling for a long time with no words for it, "Just as a lion that eats every animal in the forest eventually starves itself, AI risks collapsing the very economy it seeks to optimise. We are trapped in a coordination failure where every company automates workers to cut costs, forgetting that every employee is also a customer. When the income of the masses disappears, so does the revenue of the firms. We are witnessing a race to the bottom where the system cannot retrain humans as fast as it replaces them, leading to a catastrophic feedback loop." this paper helped bring it to life for me.
Wise investors know you can’t time the market. Those who try eventually go bankrupt. Yet, many people try to time their relationships. They look at someone’s current state, try to predict their future utility, and decide if they’re worth keeping around.
This is a recipe for emotional bankruptcy. When you treat people like stocks, you end up with a portfolio of shallow connections and no idea who is who in the zoo.
The wisest move is to just be kind. Serve whoever is in front of you without calculating their future ROI. Don't be a speculator; be a human.