The world has changed a lot over the last couple of decades – exponentially so.

The elephant in the room is intelligence: Artificial Intelligence.

What jobs are going to be redundant? What skills will be relevant? What keeps humans human? What does it mean to be human? What’s our ultimate purpose?

The smart ones invested in skills that are relevant as automation takes over.

What are those skills? That’s what we’re hiring for.

Psychology comes into play, and ultimately things boil down to decision making, problem solving, situational awareness, attention, focus, memory, dedication, devotion, purpose.

As we’re automating the parts we hate, what are we hanging on to? This is why religions are on the rise, internal and external ones. Our humanity.

Humanity boils down to biology, and we’re clinging to our DNA. We’re optimal because evolution works all the way down to the quantum mechanical level. What’s the best way to maintain stability, reduce uncertainty, in every dimension that has a field for waves to propagate in, and survive?

Evolution has figured this question out with a few billion years worth of computation, along with all the crutches that were necessary to get us to where we are.

Now we have to understand what the crutches were, and what is the valuable 7-billion-year-long-question answer.

Minds are decision making machines. They’re also pattern matching machines, and also perfect robot controllers, moving bodies. And they’re more: minds are experts at sensing, inferring, reasoning, coming to conclusions, feeling, understanding, being aware of metabolism, synchronizing with the physical nature of reality: waves, matter, rhythm.

So now selection is about being ready for a world where anything except that which takes 7 billion years to evolve is redundant. Train that. Neurons that fire together wire together: Hebbian Plasticity. Engineer your brain understanding that AI is coming and we have to learn to work differently.

Survival of the fittest. There is definitely going to be conflict – hopefully it can resolve peacefully. But we want to stay on top of the curve, so we have to understand which skills we must maximize to be competitive.

Reflecting on how my thought process has changed over the last year, the sharpening pen ends up being writing:
– Don’t think thoughts I wouldn’t write down
– Don’t think in a manner that I wouldn’t be able to express in writing
– Shorten the distance between thought and expression – always perfèct note taking and improve notation
– Shorten the distance between expression and thought – reading is writing
– Not everything can be written, the abstraction of writing is “expression”
– Thoughts manifest reality as the distance between expression and thought decreases