The Ever-Receding Pocket

I’m having an existential crisis. The latest Claude model just disproved the Jacobian conjecture. There’s a Neil deGrasse Tyson quote about God being an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller as time moves on. So AI got good at coding. Then it got good at math. Then AI is better at everything I can do. I am now the ever-receding pocket.

I’m not asking whether humans have value. (That’s a philosophical question.) This is something narrower. Like, do I still have economic value?

I just feel so, I don’t have the word for it. I look at the people around me. They’re living their lives. They’re browsing TikTok. The Jacobian conjecture is not important to them. Which is perfectly reasonable because people have their own priorities. Work is stressful. Everything is expensive. Life is hard. Who still has any brainpower left to think after work.

So what do you do? I really don’t know. You can try to accumulate wealth so you won’t have to worry about your livelihood. You can buy land somewhere and learn to grow vegetables. Or you can laugh when an LLM can’t count the R’s in “strawberry”.

I’ve been trying the first option because I’m selfish. I’m a software developer, so I’ve been building a B2B SaaS (what else can I build, right?). It’s not worth talking about it here though. So far I’m seeing very little result. I tell myself it’s a marathon, but I think I’m moving too slowly and the tech is going to outpace me.

Surreal. That’s the word on the tip of my tongue. It feels so surreal watching all these things. People are still going to work. People are still planning vacations. And you know what. Maybe they are right and I am wrong. Maybe in their lifetimes, they won’t see any meaningful changes. And if they live in developing countries, the technological advancements won’t reach them that fast.

But I like to think a bit further than that. Maybe I think too much. Maybe ignorance is bliss. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.