Thoughts while watching myself be automated
An old friend visited me a few weeks ago. And we soon got to chatting about—what else—how long will it be before all human intellectual work is automated.
My position was: I dunno, because things are moving fast right now but what if we run out of data or scaling laws break and algorithmic progress stalls? His position was: Soon.
Then he started asking about this blog. What were the most popular posts? This was slightly ominous given his regrettable tendency not to consume most Dynomight internet content. But I told him probably Underrated Reasons to be Thankful and its sequels, and that seemed to be the end of it.
But then a week later, he texted to ask if I had any other short-form writing. And then he sent me a list of previous Reasons I’d written and asked me to rank them by quality. And gradually it dawned on me that he had decided it was time to automate me.
Soon he started sending new AI-generated Reasons. Which weren’t great. But then he tuned his prompt and they got better. And then he switched models and increased the scale by 1000x and added a secondary scoring AI and tuned the scoring AI prompt and the Reasons got better and better and better and better. And as I watched all this happen, I couldn’t help but reflect:
