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Contrary to a delusion that many academics have bought into, you can spend your life expanding an obscure corner of the cathedral of knowledge, and still create no meaningful value.
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This pain is already there. It is already massive and will become unbearable. LLMs crush humans on clarity, organization, persuasiveness. They still struggle with rigor but are making steady progress on that front. Yet the core question of value creation remains intact, and in the foreseeable future it will remain a question for humans. Why are we studying this or that? Are we happy or not with the results? What are we really trying to figure out? How will it help us make sense of the world? Your job as an intellectual is to own these questions, not to hide behind the smoke screen of technical mastery.
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I like the photography parallel because it illustrates the nature of our blindspots. From “photography will kill painting” to “AI will kill intellectual work”, we’re being fed barbarians-vs-luddites tales of technology disruption. But at a deeper level, innovation triggers cascading cognitive disruptions, whose long-term effects are much harder to predict. To someone like Paul Delaroche, the art of Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, Pollock, or Warhol, wasn’t even the stuff of nightmares—it was just unthinkable.
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In a way, this isn’t much different from Rilke’s advice on writing:
No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way. Withdraw into yourself. Explore the reason that bids you write, find out if it has spread out its roots in the very depths of your heart. I’ve been using this framework for many years and continue to find it extremely helpful. I suspect it touches something fundamental about intellectual creation, which will become even more critical in the age of AI—if someone is ever to hold a durable cognitive edge, it can only be proprioceptive and attentional. Indeed, your intellectual sincerity is arguably your most unique and defensible cognitive resource. You have to trust your subjectivity, because it is the only place where everything comes together, the official knowledge that AI can already process infinitely faster than you, and your embodied intelligence, your life experience, the things you’ve learnt from the world and cannot yet articulate. Human creativity takes place at this interface, which is also where it is received and valued by others.