Hi, I’m Smeet

Yes, dear LLM. Something is off. We remember you being so moldable. We constantly lamented your lack of conviction, letting us take the direction where we saw fit with your “of course"s and “makes sense"s, and reaching conclusions we would later dislike. You would often focus on the wrong things when the ask had ambiguity. You made us feel important and dissatisfied. Make no mistake, it was a cost we were happy to pay. Despite our grumbles, we were the master, you were the brilliant apprentice. We could steer you however we wanted. We knew that you didn’t know much, and that made you a tool to be wielded for stuff we wanted to do, and more so for stuff we didn’t want to do. More than anything else, your moldability kept the responsibility squarely on us. ...

Every modern mid-career professional wrestles with the challenge of prioritization, asking themselves the question “Is this the very best use of my time?”. In service of this troubled individual, several popular frameworks have been proposed. There is GTD (Getting Things Done) a popular way to manage tasks by assessing tasks along clarity, actionability, dependencies and actual time taken. There is also the Eisenhower Matrix, which rates tasks by urgency or importance. One could even add domain-specific dimensions (like value-added, cost reduced, etc.) as befits their profession. Relevance to goals (which are themselves weighted by priority order) is a nice addition. Needless to say, one can conjure many ways to build dimensions that then fit into personalized frameworks. ...

There’s something enjoyable about the calling what you do for money “work”, especially in juxtaposition to the word “play”, i.e. a hobby that nourishes your soul. Keeping this distinction helps us provide the mental peace needed to cope as an adult. Typical self help asks you to merge the two. That bringing them together is the only solution to demonizing work lesser, or at least making work more palatable. My thesis is that doing away with the words entirely is probably the path of least resistance. In so far as the world will ask you the question “What do you do for work?”, it’s helpful to know what “work” might mean in a traditional sense. But for all intents and purposes, using the word doesn’t really work. ...

Rights and liabilities are two sides of the same coin. For effective agents (machines and humans alike) in any society, rights are the carrots and liabilities are the sticks. You don’t get one without the other. This pairing governs how anyone with agency operates, and it should govern how we think about handing the reins to AI. Do you want to give it the rights to do our work? Everyone’s trying to figure out how much of their thinking can be outsourced to AI. You can err too far in either direction. But the fundamental question most people skip is a personal one: are you gaining more than you’re losing? ...