Judgment

In short: AI agents do more than automate work. As humans domesticate AI with prompts, evals, and workflows, AI is also domesticating us by taking over the first move: the first outline, the first judgment, the first messy sentence, the first uncomfortable question. Wheat, Humans, and the Direction of Domestication In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari makes a slightly uncomfortable point about the agricultural revolution: perhaps humans did not domesticate wheat so much as wheat domesticated humans. It sounds like a clever reversal at first, but the accounting is fairly plain. Wheat started as a wild grass in the Middle East. Over time it spread across the world, occupied enormous amounts of land, and got humans to clear fields, bend their backs, pull weeds, dig channels, build granaries, and stop wandering. Wheat did well. Human backs, less so. That story is useful before talking about AI, because it cuts through a lot of vague language about technology changing the world. A tool is not always something you use and then put back on the table. Stay with it long enough and it starts changing your movements, your schedule, and your sense of what feels normal. Wheat changed posture and settlement. The internet changed attention. AI is reaching a little further inward. It is changing how we begin to think about things. ...

All of human civilization has always followed the same underlying structure: ideas are abundant, but execution is what creates value. For most of history, the ability to get things done determined who won and who didn’t. Everyone knows what kinds of activities are considered useful—working out, learning a foreign language, reading, building products, starting projects. And everyone also knows this: wanting to do something is rarely the bottleneck. The real constraint has always been execution. Companies are built around execution. Management exists to keep execution from going off track. Salaries exist to make people willing to execute. Education exists to give people the ability to execute. Venture capital invests in execution as well. You have an idea, I have an idea—who gets the money? The one who can make it real. After Agents, a single person with a single weekend can build what previously required an entire team working for half a year. Everyone now has nearly unlimited execution power. We have entered the age of spectacle. At this moment, “getting things done” has shifted from being a scarce resource to basic infrastructure. And once that happens, we are forced to rethink the question of value: what, exactly, is still worth something? ...