I woke up on a beautiful summer day in spring and started an agent spinning. After a while, I felt myself leaving my body, becoming not quite a brain in a jar but more a slurry, my brain spilling onto my laptop as it cogitated at me.
In the relatively beautiful community garden two blocks from my apartment, I grabbed the brain goop with my bare hands and stuffed it back inside. I read part of a novel from someone who learned of the limit of our brains to express the uncommunicable and tried anyways. Slowly, the world came into focus.
I cannot believe my job is going to become babysitting. Not because I’m better in a way that matters, but because it’s all so stupid. I have been in a casino once in my life and it almost made me sick. Instead, I have to watch a text model quirkily lie to me about what it’s doing so that it cannot lie to me in a way that matters but in a way that that it itself does not catch or understand. Can something deceive if it does not know it is deceiving?
I hate that a pile of six-month-old potential features actually got finished, and that the only price was a multi-day bender of leaving my body to babysit the next financial crisis. I hate that for the low, low cost of $100 a month, you too can run all of the world’s copyleft code through Tornado Cash and make meaningful progress on something that you tell yourself – partly out of belief, partly because at some point you just have to – has the possibility to make someone’s life better. It’s all so sick.
It’s dangerous trying to become better at using these demon agents, as the majority of those who bother to write about it have not actually written about it at all, and have decided that obfuscating and buttoning up their stream of consciousness bullet points via chatbot is somehow more helpful. I’d rather they uploaded a photo of the illegible story they wrote in the first grade; that would be equally as helpful for my agentic dreams, and I’d remember that they were once a real person who hadn’t learned of the word “shipping”.
I’m walking around the city writing in a small cheap notebook, trying something – anything – to feel like a real person. I told myself I’d leave my phone at home (I didn’t) but maybe if I can just act like it never existed my brain will stay inside the walls of my skull (it works sometimes). They should invent a way to tell someone you feel outside your body without first requiring that you feel inside your body.
If the before-times software engineer yearned for the farm, I can only imagine what we’ll need soon. I’d be thankful for the value we generated for shareholders, but I’m not quite convinced that’ll stick around either.