But What To Do About It?

The future is here. I'm deeply uncertain what to do about it.

I first had a passive inkling AI might be much bigger than chatbots 2 years ago in Alaska. Like buying my first bitcoins in 2013, I just paid a little extra attention when smart people around me started saying things I hadn't ever heard before.

I only started actively defining my role in the Computer Future last July and August, eventually proposing altruistic alignment as my contribution. Going all-in on that project catalyzed a lot of learning, eventually culminating in my full-circle debugging of multiple erroneous starting assumptions.

At this point, I've done away with altruism altogether. I've refined my views on consensus and ground truth. It seems a Wall-E future is inevitable, or at least that civil war isn't worth worrying about. I suspect the masses are too pacified and comfortable to disrupt their access to Netflix, video games, Youtube, etc. (And the universal objective function would fight any large scale entropic acceleration.)

My main personal concern going forward is income. Having spent over $180,000 in the second half of 2025, mostly on &U grants, I've finally managed to bluff away my personal poker funds. Also, I've run into the bandwidth bounds of English and other limiting factors.

For example: talent selection used to be THE critical ingredient in success. Leverage could only be built by empowering other people. Going forward, this probably becomes secondary to becoming an exceptional doer yourself.

I've understood for some time that the critical gap between me and my successful founder friends is simply time spent hacking on projects. My path has been very different because lower energy states have always been available to me, versus the hard work of doing legit engineering.

I originally decided to go to MIT when I 4-8 years old. I don't remember exactly when the concept of being Q stuck, but I always wanted to build things. At the end of high school, however, I both subconsciously picked up on the purpose of school being signaling and became part of the same problem—namely, adult human nature.

Not yet able to create institutional rot, I merely robbed myself of skills. Unwilling to do any meaningful work, purely leaning into laziness, my goal heading into MIT shifted to merely self-certifying that I could hang with world-class smarty-pantses, rather than excelling at being one myself.

I had a few transformative experiences as I cycled through departments in search of the easiest path to a degree. I certainly met a lot of interesting people, which was my main goal after figuring out that I was sufficiently technically capable within the first couple weeks.

But the main skill I developed was to shift my identity, priorities, and living environment in order to suit my internal desires and avoid discomfort. I've always been good at doing things, but boy, was I good at this! It's been my primary driver and distinguishing characteristic for the past 10 years.

I feel unbelievably lucky and grateful that coding is now an obsolete skill. But at the same time, even lazy people like me have to admit that it's time to build. Even if computers can code themselves now, we still have a role to play as system architects for at least another year or two.

Elon thinks life is a video game for good reason. He recently made the incredibly astute observation that the world's most valuable companies have digital output and can be thought of as bitstreams. It's becoming increasingly obvious to anybody with sufficient experience and knowledge that we are all at risk of becoming NPCs. Or rather, that we already are.

Blogging every day no longer serves my purposes as it's starting to fall into the category of "learning as distraction" and a kind of dopamine activity. My expanded environment of interest now demands that I correct my internal idiosyncrasies. In the age of $0 information and $0 productivity, implementing ideas matters a lot more than talking about them.

Action becomes speech. This has always been the case, per my earlier point stealing PG's idea that language has insufficient resolution in certain idea domains. But we are seeing this today in a fundamentally new and different way than ever before.

I'm not sure exactly what to do except to throw all my previous plans out the window and begin anew each day with a fresh desk. I'm sure this won't be my last blog post, but I'd like to eliminate any expectations going forward with posting schedules.

In the limit, a Computer Future eliminates all schedules.

I think I'll start tinkering. I know enough to get started.

The race is on.