While the world frets about the future of AI, the universal basic income advocates have an answer ready for the big question of "what are we all going to do when the jobs are gone": Just pay everyone enough to loaf around as they see fit! Problem solved, right? Wrong. The purpose of work is not just about earning your keep, but also about earning a purpose and a place in the world. This concept is too easily dismissed by intellectuals who imagines a world of liberated artists and community collaborators, if only unshackled by the burdens of capitalism. Because that's the utopia that appeals to them. But we already know what happens to most people who lose their job. It's typically not a song-and-dance of liberation, but whimper with increasing despair. Even if they're able to draw benefits for a while. Some of that is probably gendered. I think men have a harder time finding a purpose without a clear and externally validated station of usefulness. As a corollary to the quip that "women want to be heard, men want to be useful" from psychology. Long-term unemployment, even cushioned by state benefits, often leads men to isolation and a rotting well-being. I've seen this play out time and again with men who've lost their jobs, men who've voluntarily retired from their jobs, and men who've sold their companies. As the days add up after the centering purpose in their life disappeared, so does the discontent with "the problem of being". Sure, these are just anecdotes. Some men are thrilled to do whatever, whenever, without financial worries. And some women mourn a lost job as deeply as most men do. But I doubt it's evenly split. Either way, I doubt we'll be delighted to discover what societal pillars wither away when nobody is needed for anything. If all labor market participation rests on intrinsic motivation. That strikes me as an obvious dead end. We may not have a say in the manner, of course. The AI revolution, should it materialize like its proponents predict, has the potential to be every bit as unstoppable as the agricultural, industrial, and IT revolutions before it. Where the Luddites and the Amish, who reject these revolutions, end up as curiosities on the fringe of modern civilization. The rest of us are transformed, whether we like it or not. But generally speaking, I think we have liked it! I'm sure it was hard to imagine what we'd all be doing after the hoe and the horse gave way to the tractor and combine back when 97% of the population worked the land. Same when robots and outsourcing claimed the most brutish assembly lines in the West. Yet we found our way through both to a broadly better place. The IT revolution feels trickier. I've personally worked my life in its service, but I'm less convinced it's been as universal good as those earlier shifts. Is that just nostalgia? Because I remember a time before EVERYTHING IS COMPUTER? Possibly, but I think there's a reason the 80s in particular occupy such a beloved place in the memory of many who weren't even born then. What's more certain to me is that we all need a why, as Viktor Frankl told us in Man's Search for Meaning. And while some of us are able to produce that artisanal, bespoke why imagined by some intellectuals and academics, I think most people need something prepackaged. And a why from work offers just that. Especially in a world bereft of a why from God. It's a great irony that the more comfortable and frictionless our existence becomes, the harder we struggle with the "the problem of being". We just aren't built for a life of easy leisure. Not in mass numbers, anyway. But while the masses can easily identify the pathology of that when it comes to the idle rich, and especially their stereotyped trust-fund offspring, they still crave it for themselves. Orwell's thesis is that heaven is merely that fuzzily-defined place that provides relief from the present hardships we wish to escape. But Dostoevsky remarks that should man ever find this relief, he'd be able to rest there for just a moment, before he'd inevitably sabotage it — just to feel something again. I think of that often while watching The Elon Show. Musk's craving for the constant chaos of grand gestures is Dostoevsky's prediction underwritten by the wealth of the world's richest man. Heaven is not a fortune of $200 billion to be quietly enjoyed in the shade of a sombrero. It's in the arena. I’ve also pondered this after writing about why Apple needs a new asshole in charge, and reflecting on our book, It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work. Yes, work doesn’t have to be crazy, but for many, occasional craziness is part of the adventure they crave. They’ll tolerate an asshole if they take them along for one such adventure — accepting struggle and chaos as a small price to feel alive. It's a bit like that bit from The Babylon Bee: Study Finds 100% Of Men Would Immediately Leave Their Desk Job If Asked To Embark Upon A Trans-Antarctic Expedition On A Big Wooden Ship. A comical incarnation of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs thesis that derives its punchline from how often work lacks a Big Why. So when a megalomanic like Musk — or even just a run-of-the-mill asshole with a grand vision — offers one, the call of the wild beckons. Like that big wooden ship and the open sea. But even in the absence of such adventure, a stupid email job offers something. Maybe it isn't much, maybe it doesn't truly nourish the soul, but it's something. In the Universal Basic Income scenario of having to design your own adventure entirely from scratch, there is nothing. Just a completely blank page with no deadline to motivate writing the first line. If we kill the old 9-5 "why", we better find a new one. That might be tougher than making silicon distill all our human wisdom into vectors and parameters, but we have to pull it off.

As part of my work on #eng-strategy-book, I’ve been editing a bunch of stuff. This morning I wanted to work on two editing problems. First, I wanted to ensure I was referencing strategies evenly across chapters (and not relying too heavily on any given strategy). Second, I wanted to make sure I was making references to other chapters in a consistent, standardized way, Both of these are collecting Markdown links from files, grouping those links by either file or url, and then outputting the grouped content in a useful way. I decided to experiment with writing a one-shot prompt to write the script for me rather than writing it myself. The prompt and output (from ChatGPT 4.5) are available in this gist. That worked correctly! The output was a bit ugly, so I tweaked the output slightly by hand, and also adjusted the regular expression to capture less preceding content, which resulted in this script. Although I did it by hand, I’m sure it would have been faster to just ask ChatGPT to fix the script itself, but either way these are very minor tweaks. Now I can call the script in either standard of --grouped mode. Example of ./scripts/links.py "content/posts/strategy-book/*.md" output: Example of ./scripts/links.py "content/posts/strategy-book/*.md" --grouped output: Altogether, this is a super simple script that I could have written in thirty minutes or so, but this allowed me to write it in less than ten minutes, and get back to actually editing with the remaining twenty.

I’m trying something a bit different today – fiction. I had an idea for a short story the other evening, and I fleshed it out into a proper piece. I want to get better at writing fiction, and the only way to do that is with practice. I hope you like what I’ve written! When the fire starts, I am already running for the exit. When the fire starts, the world is thrown into sharp relief. I have worked in this theatre since it opened its doors. When the fire starts, my work begins – and in a way, it also ends. When the fire starts, they run beneath me. When the fire starts, they leave their bags behind. Their coats. Their tickets. They hear me, though I have no voice. When the fire starts, I know I will never leave. When the fire starts, I will keep running. I will always be running for the exit, because somebody must. A “running man” exit sign. Photo by Mateusz Dach on Pexels, used under the Pexels license. Hopefully it’s clear that this isn’t a story about a person, but about the “running man” who appears on emergency exit signs around the world. It’s an icon that was first devised by Japanese graphic designer Yukio Ota in 1970 and adopted as an international symbol in 1985. I was sitting in the theatre on Friday evening, waiting for the second half to start, and my eye was drawn to the emergency exit signs. It struck me that there’s a certain sort of tragedy to the running man – although he guides people to the exit, in a real fire his sign will be burnt to a crisp. I wrote the first draft on the train home, and I finished it today. I found the “when the fire starts” line almost immediately, but the early drafts were more vague about the protagonist. I thought it would be fun to be quite mysterious, to make it a shocking realisation that they’re actually a pictogram. I realised it was too subtle – I don’t think you’d necessarily work out who I was talking about. I rewrote it so you get the “twist” much earlier, and I think the concept still works. Another change in the second draft was the line breaks. I use semantic linebreaks in my source code, but they get removed in the rendered site. A paragraph gets compressed into a single line. That’s fine for most prose, but I realised I was losing something in this short story. Leaning into the line breaks highlights the repetition and the structure of the words, so I put them back. It gives the story an almost poetic quality. I’ve always been able to find stories in the everyday and the mundane – a pencil is a rocket ship, a plate is a building, a sock is a cave. The only surprising thing about this idea is that it’s taken me this long to turn the running man into a character in one of my stories. I really enjoyed writing this, so maybe you’ll see more short stories in the future. I have a lot of ideas, but not much experience turning them into written prose. Watch this space! [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]

The difference between "low prices" as a race to the bottom or as a success story (like Amazon, Costco, IKEA, Vanguard) is in leveraging intentional weaknesses.