We have gained superpowers. The question is for how long

Over the weekend, there was flooding in Lommedalen. Fifteen minutes later, my agents had built a flood app.

That is the new normal. You can build almost anything you want, and scale as much as you want. All you need is a good idea. And to be better than the machines at directing them.

The last sentence is the important one.

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, an Anthropic researcher and one of the pioneers behind diffusion models, gave a talk at Stanford this summer with advice for young researchers. His starting point is that AI will probably outperform the best humans at every intellectual task within a few years. If he is right, we have a window. A few years in which our thinking still makes a difference.

His advice is simple: Use AI in your work now. Choose problems that become easier as the models improve. Do not assume the old career paths are safe. Let the machines code, execute and verify, but keep the judgements to yourself.

And then this: ‘Writing is thinking, and if you outsource your writing, then what you’ve actually done is you’ve outsourced your thinking.’

AI researcher Henrik Skaug Sætra has taken it even further. He is now writing parts of a new textbook by hand, on a typewriter and on old computers without AI. His reasoning is that when AI creeps into every writing tool, his thinking is also under attack.

Both struck a chord with me. My agents write code all day. But it is liberating to write a text entirely myself now and then, precisely because that is where I discover what I think.

The superpowers are real. But they come with an expiry date. Today, the bottleneck is people who know what is worth building. The day the machines also become best at seeing the need, choosing the direction and directing the work, our ideas will no longer be scarce.

I do not know whether it will take three years or twenty. But I know how I want to use the time: build a lot, learn quickly and keep my judgement sharp. That is what makes the superpowers mine.

What would you build if you knew you only had a few years?

Sætra’s piece about writing on a typewriter: https://lnkd.in/ePmyNwsH

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