But it doesn't want anything. It isn't answerable. It doesn't stand anywhere.
I want a better future. I'm seeking those answers. I stand in the present.
My Situation
AI everywhere, for everything, all the time. I really don't know where we're going as a society. Honestly, I think it's thrilling to be living through all this rampant change.
I think education has been left behind. AI empowers each individual, directly. It's about reaching the boundaries faster. The climb up to the frontier used to take a lifetime — now the tool carries you most of the way up.
It's about commoditizing thinking. It thinks for you. And so we can do more and more things we don't understand. We act without knowing, and the gap between what we can do and what we actually know keeps widening.
If it's not used, somebody else will, and we'll be left behind. We treat this as a race when in fact we don't even know where it ends. But still we run. We run for answers, the finish line moves while we run, and we run out of time.
So where is the added value a human can give? Is it about the prompt? Is it about making it land? Is it about making money?
Maybe the value was never in doing the thing. Maybe it's in choosing which thing — and in seeing when the answer is wrong in a way the machine can't see.
What is money? I'd say it's added value, and value is time — or the other way around: to add value we need time. But now we get things done in an instant. So should the added value be zero?
I don't think so. If production becomes instant, value leaves time behind and hides somewhere else. In judgment. In taste. In knowing what is worth doing at all.
An Old Fear
This fear is not new. It might be the oldest one we have about our own tools.
The alphabet did it first. Two dozen marks instead of a thousand characters, and suddenly anyone could hold a thought outside their head. It commoditized memory. It commoditized thinking — the first time.
Plato saw it and was afraid. In the Phaedrus he has Socrates tell of Theuth, the god who invents writing and brings it to the king as a gift, a cure for forgetting. The king refuses to thank him. Writing won't give you memory, he says — only reminding. Not wisdom, only its likeness. People will read without learning, and seem to know much while knowing nothing.
That's my fear, almost word for word. About letters. Twenty-four hundred years ago.
And here's the joke: I only know his fear because he wrote it down. The tool he distrusted is the only reason his distrust survived. He was right about what we'd lose — no one carries the Iliad in their head anymore. And he had no idea what we'd gain.
Maybe that's the pattern. The worriers name the cost correctly and miss the ceiling completely. The alphabet didn't think for us. It freed a floor, so we could think on the next one up.
So when I say AI commoditizes thinking, maybe I only mean: it's the alphabet again. One more layer of the mind handed to a tool — and us, climbing one floor higher to find what's still ours.
My Awareness
How should a human being describe themselves? What describes who I am? I've been thinking about this lately — for around two years now. We barely own anything.
Our names aren't ours. What we know may not be ours either; we trade our time for knowledge that other people, in the past, already expanded. To know is to stand on a pile of borrowed time. We climb the backs of the ones who came before.
Are we expanding that knowledge? Can we call that ours? And even the new — isn't it just old pieces rearranged? A new combination of things that already existed. Is possession even good?
Intellectual property may be the only thing that could be called an inherent good of each human being. But even so — are my thoughts really mine? Even they are borrowed fragments meeting in one place. I think and act because I'm part of the bigger picture.
I'm playing my part.
My Part
Both halves are the same question. Outside: where is my value when the machine does everything? Inside: what is even mine?
Maybe they answer each other. Nothing here is fully mine — my knowledge is borrowed, my ideas are old things rearranged, even my thoughts are inherited fragments meeting for a moment. The machine can do without knowing. It can know without caring. It runs faster than me, and it has nothing to lose.
But it doesn't want anything. It isn't answerable. It doesn't stand anywhere.
So maybe the part that stays mine was never the doing or the knowing. It's the choosing. The taste. The judgment of what is worth doing at all. Caring enough to be wrong and to own it.
I don't know where the race ends. I don't think I need to win it. I need to know which direction is mine.
That's my part. I'll play it.
References
A map of the rabbit holes behind this, for when I come back to it.
- The burden of knowledge. Benjamin F. Jones, The Burden of Knowledge and the "Death of the Renaissance Man": Is Innovation Getting Harder? (2005/2009). The frontier keeps moving away; each generation has to climb higher just to reach it. To stand on the shoulders of giants, you first have to climb their backs. — NBER · full PDF
- Doing without knowing. Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911). "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." Written a century before AI, and it's still the whole story. — Project Gutenberg
- The oldest version of this fear. Plato, Phaedrus (~370 BC). Socrates tells of Theuth, who invents writing and offers it as a cure for forgetting; the king answers that it will plant forgetfulness instead, and hand people the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. The complaint about commoditized thinking, twenty-four centuries early — surviving only because someone wrote it down. — Project Gutenberg
- Ideas as recombination. Martin L. Weitzman, Recombinant Growth (QJE, 1998). New ideas are old ideas reconfigured. The possible combinations explode; the bottleneck is the effort to test them, not the supply. (Schumpeter already called innovation "new combinations.") — Harvard
- Recombination meets AI. Matt Clancy, Combinatorial innovation and technological progress in the very long run. A readable bridge from Weitzman to what AI does when it searches that combination space for us. — New Things Under the Sun
- Where this might be going. Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. — situational-awareness.ai
- One version of the race. AI Futures Project, AI 2027. A concrete, month-by-month scenario of how the next few years could unfold. — ai-2027.com
- Koppl, Roger, Abigail Devereaux, James Herriot, and Stuart Kauffman. 2019. The Industrial Revolution as a Combinatorial Explosion. — arXiv:1811.04502
Prompts
The prompts I used to shape this with the machine. (Is it about the prompt?)
i wrote this article, can you help me polish it maintaining my tone and adding some extra ideas we have been discussing. i want to write it for me so i can read it in the future
The original draft I wrote myself
+++
title = "My Situation, My Awareness"
date = 2026-06-15
[taxonomies]
tags=["philosophy"]
+++
## **My Situation**
AI everywhere, for everything and everytime. I really don't know where we are going as a society, honestly I think it's thrilling to be living all the rampant changes.
I consider that education has been left behind, the power of AI empowers each individual. It's about reaching to the boundaries faster.
It's about commoditizing thinking. It thinks for you.
If it's not used, somebody else will do, hence we will be left behind. We are thinking this as a race when in fact, we don't even know where it ends. However, we run, we run for answers and we run out of time.
I think the tool has to be used, but where is the added value humans can give? Is It about the prompt? Is It about making it land? Is It about making money?
What is money? I would say it's added value, and value is time, or vice versa; to add value we need time. But now, we get things done in an instant, so should the added value be zero?
## **My Awareness**
How should human beings describe themselves? What describes who I am?
I've been thinking about this lately, I would say for around 2 years; we barely own anything.
Our names aren't ours, what we know may be because we exchange "our" time for knowledge that has been expanded by other people in the past.
Are we expanding that knowledge, can we call that ours? Posession is good?
Intelectual property may be the only thing that may be considered an inherent good of each human being, but even so are my thoughts really mine? I think and act because I'm part of the bigger picture. I'm playing my part
i want to add a conclusion in the end, you are completely free to do whatever you want. Then i would like to add a references section adding the things we have been discussing with links and these 2 urls: https://situational-awareness.ai/ https://ai-2027.com/
i would say that ai is like the alphabet, it commoditizes thinking
yes please add it, and i want to add some background as you did with plato maybe an extra section, also i want to add these prompts to the prompts section.