You may or may not be aware that I have been in the social media game for a long time. It’s a reality usually reflected in my writing through Serious, Important Pontification (SIP). For this, I apologize. Sometimes I just can’t help it. I spot some odd discourse online (of all places!), I have an interesting in-person conversation (yes, it does happen), or the accumulation of longstanding exposure to the systems driving information flow at massive scale in my professional life inspires some hot take (what can you do?). In each of these instances I feel compelled to channel a core thesis swirling around in my head into an essay, and in doing so it becomes impossible to avoid the production of pure, uncut SIP. For this, I must once again apologize.

To partially make up for the transgression(s), today I am choosing to create A Silly Post (ASP) that lists 15 ridiculous yet plausible engagement features/metrics that could be applied to any given social media platform. Over time, my hope is that I produce enough ASPs to counterbalance the SIPs. We need equilibrium in this increasingly fraught world, both internally and externally. I know it, you know it. Let’s get there together.

Now please continue reading, but specifically in a joyful manner. Thank you.

1. Reacting to a reaction (e.g. liking a like): You should be able to react to the reactions someone else has made. This would be fun and funny in a context with friends and family and in theory even strangers or enemies. The fact that a friend has liked something embarrassing elicits joy in me, and I want to express this.

2. Posts deleted in under 30 minutes: Speaking of embarrassing, that’s what I’d call deleting a post immediately or shortly thereafter because it’s not getting the traction you want. You deserve to know how many times someone has done this.

3. Unsend regret timer: An even more granular version of the above in which the actual time before deletion is shown.

4. Ghoster label: I haven’t been on dating apps for a long time, but I would venture a guess that ghosting is still rampant on them. People should know who’s a frequent ghoster so they don’t waste any more time than they already do.

5. Read receipts for read receipts: Do you want to know how many times someone has obsessively confirmed that you’ve seen their message without responding? I think you do.

6. Slop label: This is probably already 90 percent of content online, AI-assisted or not. Better yet might just be a “not slop” label.

7. Screenshot detection with commentary: You should be able to know when someone not only took a screenshot of your content, but why. Was it to make fun of you? Was it out of jealousy? Curious heads must know.

8. Comment thread overall vibe: Before you dive into a comment thread rabbit hole, you should be able to gauge the high level vibe. Is this fun? Is it toxic? Is it wholesome?

9. Almost commented indicator: This would show how many people (and who) typed in a comment but decided not to hit send.

10. Re-read receipts/Story rewatches: How many times has a given person viewed your content? Embarrassing!

11. Mutual over-thinkers: This could be good! It flags when two people have both viewed each other’s profile multiple times without interacting. Don’t miss out.

12. Great minds alert: Get a notification when you and a friend have both liked the same obscure content within a small window.

13. Engagement bait label: Self-explanatory. You know it when you see it, so let’s shame the people who do it.

14. Humble-brag label: Similar to above. Big one for LinkedIn.

15. Agree and disagree reactions: You might think the like and angry reactions care of this, but I disagree.

You’re welcome!

Recently, I walked into my local bookstore without the intent to pick up anything in particular. This act on its own is a delightful little treat. I like books! I have a long list of them I’d like to read on my Notes app. It’s both a blessing and a curse that this list only grows longer and longer though, so why not occasionally ignore it and see what catches my eye? Something always does, and by meeting that spark directly, I’ve welcomed a new perspective into my life that a list-obsessed brain might never have otherwise encountered.

On this latest open-minded visit, what should stand out to me but A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros? Delightful as well, for I like to walk! I do it to think, to calm down, to converse, to pass time, to just do it. As Emily has observed, my cure for practically anything is “let’s go for a walk.” We live in a city, so the shape of these walks is often a highly stimulating loop of urban sounds, smells, sights, and people. There’s comfort in these familiar routes, but also in routes taken elsewhere in our city, other cities, suburbs, towns, and any (mostly) untouched natural land. The constant is the walking itself. The movement, and the absence of any explicit purpose other than said movement.

I got to this relationship with walking more or less on my own, so I guess I didn’t need a heady exploration of walking to teach it to me. But I figured it would be interesting to see what Gros, and the philosophers he examines in his book, had to say about it. It’s one thing to know something innately, another to express it through words, and another entirely to have it reflected back to you through someone else’s words. On some level the point of both reading and walking for pleasure are the same—to better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit—so I brought Gros to the cash register and walked his words home.

Among them, eventually we stumble across Gros’s titular philosophy:

“The magic of walking lies in the unproductive repetition of putting one foot in the front of the other: of rediscovering a reasonless reason for carrying on. Our step sets the rhythm for our breathing, and in return our breath delivers the energy we need. This gently wears away at the body as if it were being polished, resulting in a radiant weariness. In the evening the body, like a faithful dog overcome with fatigue, curls up at the foot of the soul and falls asleep serenely, knowing that its rest is well deserved.”

Lots to examine here. First of all, it’s worth noting that what precedes this is some grousing over the the way life “has become fatally predictable” and how the world and the author “have lost all our capacity to surprise.” Gros is a French philosopher and this book was published when he was 42, so I’ll allow that the darkness from which he pulls this central conceit is probably the product of some potent, highly intellectual, midlife existential ennui. Not everyone gets to luxuriate in this brand of despair.

Still, he’s onto something: walking is simple, repetitive, mindless, and, practiced for long enough in a given day, satisfyingly tiring. If you’re feeling an unproductive boredom and restlessness of the mind, why not take the body on a walk, a “reasonless reason” to keep going? Worst case, you tire yourself out for a good night’s rest. Best case, you jog a jumbled mind into a clear path for productive action. Now, I won’t sit here and tell you that a walk is all it takes to spark the inspiration that will revolutionize your life out of a rut. But if it could help you move forward while priming you for some better physical rest, why wouldn’t you do it all the time? Especially when life feels particularly hard?

That’s the baseline, a simple boost for a troubled and weary mind. For a clear and energized one, though? Take this line from the beginning of a book written by Immanuel Kant, Mr. Transcendental Idealism (our minds shape reality) himself, as repeated by Gros in the chapter exploring Kant’s own relationship to walking:

“I have traced a path which I will follow. When my advance begins, nothing will be able to stop it.”

Okay, then! Considering the guy’s ultimate impact on philosophy, society, morality, politics, etc. as one of the most influential thinkers ever, this in retrospect is…well played. An intentional statement that earned its audacity. Far beyond the idea of walking just to shake things up a bit, it position the act as a necessary, methodical engagement—one that becomes unstoppable when supported by the weight of true purpose. Do I have such a clear, self-charted path, such an unshakable sense of what I’m supposed to do? No. Quite frankly, I do not. But at the risk of going a bit too hard on the metaphor, I admire and aspire to the level of confidence in it. Ignoring Kant’s outcomes and influence—in fairness, the statement could have come from anyone with drive and a goal—the message is simply about putting one foot in front of the other. That’s always the value of walking, literally or spiritually. Nothing more, nothing less.

To really underscore the point, that it’s the walking itself that matters, however one does it, I’ll pull another quote from another philosopher that Gros spends a full chapter examining for his relationship to the act. Jean-Jacques Rousseau! Here he is, getting just about as journey-is-the-destination as one can get, back in the 18th century:

“I like to walk at my ease, and to stop when I like. A wandering life is what I want. To walk through a beautiful country in fine weather, without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the end, is of all kinds of life the one most suited to my taste.”

Amen, Rousseau. Amen. What could be better? Some nice weather hanging over a nice environment to wander through with some gratification waiting at the end, in whatever form one likes. We can talk for a long time about walking as a cure for boredom and stress and existential suffering. We can frame it as the ultimate metaphor for moving through life with absolute purpose. And while all that may be true and honest to the experience of so many—myself included, depending on the day—what really pops the most when I think about walking and walk while I think is this sentiment. I like to walk just to walk. It feels better than sitting, and sitting feels even better after having walked. That on its own is a prospect at the end that’s pleasant enough. Although a tasty snack or beer will do just fine too.

So. Should you read A Philosophy of Walking? Honestly, maybe not. You could get all its lessons by doing something cheaper, quicker, and easier. You could go for a walk.

Russia is a country that fascinates me. How could it not? My family fled the motherland as part of the 1989 wave of Soviet Jews that made their way to the U.S. by way of Vienna and Rome. I’ve picked up bits and pieces about the journey over the years — the tense period leading up to their departure, the way my grandfather partook in the sale of trinkets amongst fellow Jews waiting for American visas in Vienna, my father’s (unfortunate) characterization of my own conception as “the taste of freedom,” the early years in Fairlawn, New Jersey and New Haven, Connecticut, where I was born.

So when I encounter detailed stories about Russia and its former satellite states, basically in any form, I snap to attention. They’re not particularly easy to extract from my own family, which used to baffle me but makes sense the older I get, so often I go looking elsewhere. A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka taught me much about the contours of my family’s path from the USSR to USA. A Terrible Country, though fictional, articulated how someone could love an oppressive place. Evan Gershkovich’s imprisonment showed me someone my age, with my specific background, who did just that. Navalny spelled out the cost of standing up to Vladimir Putin. Most recently, another documentary on a smaller scale demonstrated the realities of life under his rule.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which won the 2026 Oscar for Best Documentary feature, is unusual. It’s quiet. It lacks larger-than-life characters. It does not transmit a hopeful message. And yet, because what it shows is so rare, so intimate, and so disturbing, I felt it deeply. Basically, videographer/narrator/subject Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, who smuggled his footage out of Russia under the pretense of a weeklong vacation to Turkey, captured a state propaganda machine in full swing. That it documents the pro-war brainwashing and recruitment of children against Ukraine at a school in a small town 200 miles north of the Kazakhstan border is all you need to know about that machine’s scope. This isn’t Moscow or St. Petersberg or even Yekaterinburg, a major but relatively unknown city east of the Ural Mountains. It’s Karabash, a town of 13,000 residents whose claim to semi-fame prior to Talankin’s film was a status as one of the world’s most polluted places.

It’s worth stressing the smallness and remoteness of Karabash and the kids who appear in the film, because doing so underscores the extent to which Putin’s ideological tentacles have slithered their way into every nook and cranny of a country home to 143.4 million people across 11 time zones. It’s crazy! Absolutely crazy. And also, unfortunately, somewhat unsurprising. Democracy in Russia has been on a backslide for years, and the government’s control over its people bears striking resemblance to other past and present authoritarian regimes. Talankin is probably never going back to the motherland, and if he did, you can bet his fate would be just as bad or worse than the director Jafar Panahi’s constant trouble with Iranian authorities.

As much as I can from such a physical and emotional distance, I really feel for Talankin and admire his work. The slice of life he undertook significant risk to show the world is bleak as hell, but it’s also clear just how much he loved it, warts and all. Home is home, no matter how shitty. Life always finds a way, no matter the impositions of oppressive power. I certainly think it has more room to flourish over here than over there, but clearly that reality shouldn’t be taken for granted. The concept and lived experience of freedom has a way of disappearing slowly and then all at once if the collective that makes it possible isn’t careful.

In any case, if Pasha’s story isn’t going to change anything for the students he cared about so much, or the people in Russia as a whole, hopefully it can serve as a warning signal elsewhere. It’s brave filmmaking, and this son of Soviet Jews is grateful for it. Check it out when you have the chance.

Last week, Emily and I finished season 2 of Beef, the anthology series on Netflix that explodes around, well, a beef between two or more characters. The leads in season 2 — Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny, and Charles Melton — are all amazing, artfully playing out creator Lee Sung Jin’s (who goes by Sonny Lee) opinionated views on class, capitalism, relationships, identity, and frankly so many other rich ideas that it’s impressive how well it hangs together as a whole.

I’m less interested in diving into the ins and outs of what I liked about Beef season 2 though, and more about something Lee said in an interview with my favorite TV watchers and podcasters, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald. Towards the end, Greenwald asked him if the finale of season 2 was meant to be cynical about marriage. Lee responded with a clear-headed take on intentionally baking ambiguity into the conclusion, featuring a concept I have always appreciated but never knew had a name:

“I have seen, like, some people who are taking it very cynically, and other people are like, oh that’s actually really beautiful. And I actually think it is doing what we intended, where we wanted the ending to be open to interpretation, we want that beholder’s share, and we also want people’s interpretation to change over time depending on where you’re at in life.”

Beholder’s share! What a phrase. Before I’d even looked up its origins, I immediately loved it. It captures, in essence, the idea that a person brings their own unique perspective to art, thus making it a collaboration with the creator. The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl is credited with coining “beholder’s share,” and it explains why past experience is so central to our enjoyment of and contempt for (and everything in between) various pieces of art. This is an exciting notion not because it means any of us are actually responsible for the work itself, but because we are always engaged in conversation with what we consume. We have some share in what an artist produces by what we bring forward to interpret it. And what we bring, of course, is different for each person.

Personally speaking, I can say that I’m particularly stimulated by art which expressly acknowledges this dynamic. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy paintings, novels, movies, etc. that have a clear artistic point of view with unambiguous endings. I just feel drawn to works that invite me to wonder, and think, and make some decisions about what I feel the artist is trying to say. That could be an explicit, this-or-that ending like Inception’s “is this real life or a dream?” spinning top or The Sopranos’s infamous “dead or alive?” cut to black. It could be a somewhat inscrutable ending like Tommy Lee’s dreams in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel). Or, like the cyclical nature of Beef’s season 2 finale, it could be a tight ending that prompts the viewer to ask if the creator’s views are cynical or hopeful. Or some mixture of both.

I think what I really appreciate about artists who are aware of and actively make space for the beholder’s share is just a simple matter of trust. I like to be trusted. I like to be respected. I’m much more inclined to give my honest take, or express my share positively, when I feel treated like a competent, complex person in my own right. I think the best art does this. I think the master creators all know this. It’s a concept I hope to deploy appropriately in my own writing — the most ambitious of it, anyway. So, thanks to Sonny Lee and Alois Riegl for the introduction. Behold!

This week marks three years since the first essay I published on Footbridge. Much has occurred since then! My 1-year and 2-year reflections included. So it is Once Again Time to look back on the past 365 days of life and writing about life.

Here we go:

• I published 17 times, which is a drop-off from year 2 (25) and year 1 (50). As long as this number doesn’t wither away down to 0 eventually, I’m good with it. I write when there’s something to write!

• Related to the above: it’s not always here that I’m writing. Over the past year I wrote ~30 pages of a novel about the development of a superintelligent AI that completely remakes the world. Fun, right? I’ve also been editing my first novel, journaling, and making all sorts of other knickknacks with words.

• Also related: I published quite a bit about AI on here. Sometimes it was in good fun. Sometimes it was pretty serious. Sometimes it was more about humans in relation to AI. I work on AI model behavior and UX at Meta, and the global economy is increasingly getting dominated by AI, so this trend makes sense.

• I still asked lots of general questions, like: “Who wants genuine change, and who’s just restless?” and “Should we comment on stuff more?” and “Will more software save us?” I even provided some answers! (Most people are just restless, no, and no.)

• I experimented with form a bit, like the time I recorded the 216 decisions I made before leaving for the day.

• I groused about how things can take too long sometimes but always tried to pump myself (and you) up when I could.

Outside of the web, I got married almost exactly 6 months ago! It was the best day of my life, hands down. Marriage so far is also pretty great, I have to say, even (especially) while the world around us feels insane.

However much I pontificate and post publicly here over the next year, I hope you’ll stick around to read. Either way, be well.

Expressed via the Notes app on my iPhone while flying from Bozeman to NYC (yesterday), I present: some intellectualizing. About intellectualizing.

Talk therapy is good for many things, but perhaps the best one is the simple effect of having a mirror held up to your patterns. I have been engaged it in consistently for over 8 years, the second half of that with one therapist. I like him! He listens, but isn’t passive. He suggests concrete tactics to work through my issues, but doesn’t pretend they’re a panacea. The fact that we’ve been working together on that foundation for quite some time is very helpful, because at this point it’s easy for us to spot deeply ingrained habits of mine lurking under whatever surface-level gripes I bring to a given session.

For example: intellectualizing as a crutch. I do it often. I get stressed about something at work or confused about an interpersonal situation, I bring it in for discussion, and I spend 40 minutes of a 45-minute session pontificating around it. Why is the situation happening? What is my role in it? How could I behave differently? WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? I try so hard! Surely that general effort should be enough not to find myself in the situation to begin with?

A few minutes before we close the session, my therapist and I agree: I very well understand what is going on—not in the situation, that’s just a symptom of the real thing—I am playing out a pattern of mine, I even know I am doing it, and I need to pull back for the real work of engaging directly with something I may be avoidant about because it’s opaque or difficult or both. I understand something out myself intellectually, but am struggling to connect with it emotionally. I am talking a lot about something unpleasant without really, seriously doing anything about it. I’m using my skills to spin narrative because it’s easier than building a better habit.

I don’t always see this, and there’s definitely irony in writing about it on my blog. But you know what? Sometimes sipping a ginger ale while squeezed into an economy seat on a cross-country flight will make you intellectualize in your Notes app, because you’re out of things to do and it’s still an hour until the plane lands. And if it makes even one other person resist their own urge to intellectualize at the expense of actually improving themselves, then that’s worth the extra minute of procrastination on my end.

Cool? Cool. Good luck to us both.

If you’re looking for something tremendously bleak to read today, might I suggest Child’s Play? It’s a dispatch from the current Silicon Valley scene by that begins with a clever sentence: “The first sign that something in San Francisco had gone very badly wrong was the signs.” What follows is a contrast between some absurd billboards hanging over the city and the public and intersecting issues of homelessness and mental health directly beneath them, then a close portrait of Chungin “Roy” Lee, Eric Zhu, and “”—college-age guys who run startups or laps around titans of industry to extract value from them.

I would understand if a long, depressing essay about the young people making millions off of an industry’s current thirst for “agentic” founders isn’t your vibe at the moment, given that there are plenty of ways to achieve the same bummer feeling in a much shorter word count—as low as zero! Go to nytimes.com or wsj.com! Open TikTok or X! Et cetera! Still, I think Kriss’ piece is well worth the read, because as someone who works in tech and likes to think he’s pretty up on the cultural pulse, going through it myself was actually something of a shock. Maybe that’s because I’m 35, and as Kriss writes, in the eyes of these gen Z founders, “a thirty-five-year-old wouldn’t be expected to know how to use anything more advanced than a rotary phone.” It’s good to be reminded of what you don’t know, even if it’s completely ridiculous, even if it makes you want to run as far away as you can from it.

Lee, Zhu, and “boat” don’t seem like bad people. They just seem aggressive and chaotic and insecure. In other words, young. I don’t take issue with the first two being ZEOs—lots of CEOs are bad regardless of their age—but channeling millions toward cheating on everything and sperm racing seems like a questionable use of capital, even when venture capitalists are eager to provide the funding. It sort of screams “the world is messed up, so let’s just make some money off of it while possibly making things worse in the process.” This is a bummer! I don’t want it to exist, so maybe I should just ignore it?

I wrestle a lot with the eternal question of how best to stay informed without getting bogged down by the world’s goings-on or the way they’re presented. It strikes me after reading this essay that an even better question might be how best to contribute toward building a world you want to live in. Yes. This is at least more proactive, which could be a cure for one of my biggest pet peeves that also happens to be a trap I fall into myself occasionally: circular complaining.

The cycle goes like this: something isn’t as I would like it to be, I get irritated or frustrated about it, I complain to a safe audience, I try to do something about it, either that effort isn’t enough or the issue is much bigger than just me, I get irritated or frustrated, I complain some more. This can go on for quite some time—a lifetime, even, if you approach challenges the same way regardless of what shape they take. It happens. We’re all human.

But, yeah. How to step off of the cycle once you sense you’re on it? If you’re in tech, the answer is simple: build something. In spirit, I’m what we like to call “aligned” with this take in the biz. In practice, or I should say the way I see it practiced, this behavior often plays out as problematic or outright bad for society. We know this. It looks like hating on social media platforms and building your own platform that becomes the same thing. It looks like worry over the safety approach at your AI company turning into endless new AI companies that also have to confront safety in the context of an industry that prioritizes growth at speed. It looks like building an app to help you connect with people in person, because you’re lonely after years of neglecting your relationships to focus on working in tech. It is, perhaps despite the best intentions, an unpleasant cycle of its own.

Listen, I’m certainly getting my ass in gear to engage ever-more meaningfully in the AI-first shift that threatens all of us knowledge workers. I’m getting better at Python, I’m sharpening my vibe prototyping and coding skills, I’m even futzing with the new capabilities of agentic (!) AI tools like OpenClaw. But I do this in the context of ideas that excite me, not simply to be in the mix of some frenetic, frivolous race to the bottom. This isn’t a subtle swipe at AI—I’m genuinely fascinated by its explosion and want to continue working on it. It’s a less-than-subtle swipe at techno-utopianism, which has powered much of that explosion. The idea that technological advancement will solve all of our problems isn’t just ignorant, it’s false. People don’t need more software. They need to be more human.

This would be the perfect time to segue into pitching my startup idea, whether seriously or as a joke. But don’t worry, I don’t have a startup and this isn’t a shitpost. It is, earnestly, a plea to go a little further than the call to touch grass. To become more human, whether you like technology or not, you need to recognize that the only way to connect, to feel connected, and to live and breath and experience life as a human is to…nurture that which makes you human. Go for a walk. Meet someone for coffee. Stand in line for something you want to do. Embrace boredom and awkwardness and things not fitting together. Make stuff. Feel good. Feel bad. Let feelings pass. Work hard. Challenge your mind. Challenge your body. Grow!

And if you come away with only one thing from this 1,000-word essay that you read online, let it be this: no one knows exactly what will save us, but it’s definitely not more software.

A few months ago, I read a wonderful piece from Blackbird Spyplane that argues two points: making stuff is fun, and using AI to make it takes away from what is pleasurable about doing so. The simple example is drawing a card for someone you love, not because you’re an artist, but because it’s a voluntary act that’s nice in the doing and nice in the delivery, the creation of a meaningful token of appreciation “rather than putting something inert, disenchanted and disposable between [you and the recipient].”

Now, the author (and his parents) frown upon Hallmark-style greeting card companies, suggesting that however well intentioned, gifting one of their inventory just means a lot less than one you draw yourself. This is probably true in most cases. At the same time, one of my favorite parts of buying a predesigned card is to do the work of finding something that will actually resonate with the recipient. Failing that (and I actually enjoy this even more), I will buy a card that’s clearly off the mark and use it as the foundation for a joke that hits bullseye. A get well card for graduation. A retirement card for a bar-mitzvah. An Easter card for Passover and vice versa. Those are just the cheap jokes—shop around for corny card copy and you’ll quickly find a promising lump that can be molded into something fun with a few choice edits.

Regardless of where I go with the card, I always throw everything I have into what goes inside. I love writing letters, especially to people I care deeply about, frankly with no plan other than to sit down with a pen and see what comes out. I would never outsource this act to another person, let alone a machine. So even if I don’t quite align with the card example, I understand what it’s getting at and what it suggests about generative AI. Channeling that which is uniquely you into an output, whether it’s for someone specific, a lot of people you’ll never meet, or simply yourself, is among the most human acts that exist. Using any tool to fully replace that essence, or augment it in such a way that the intent is watered down, surely takes less time but takes on an inorganic hue in exchange.

At the risk of boosting an argument that no doubt plays well with the Substack crowd of writers, artists, purists, etc. just to do a 180 halfway through and say “actually, AI can be good for creativity in this way,” well, sorry. It can. Under the right conditions!

Here’s what I mean: we all have something we’re very good at, very passionate about, and ideally both. It’s very human to pursue something on the back of a skill or passion, and it doesn’t have to be artistic to be a craft. Exercising can be a craft. Playing a sport can be a craft. Any form of work can be a craft. Making money can be a craft. Shit, just engaging in conversation can be a craft. So who in their right mind would deny themselves an opportunity to get better at their craft? And who are we to pooh pooh that desire for an extra edge?

This bumps up against something nebulous that I have a difficult time articulating clearly when it comes to generative AI, and of course I am biased because I work on AI products myself, but it feels like a worthy effort to nurture the wisps of an idea into something concrete. I wholeheartedly, full-throatedly will say that if we’re not careful, AI will make us stupid. This isn’t just conjecture—see a recent study from Anthropic which found that “using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery” of coding by software developers when compared to a group that had no AI assistance. Go even deeper, and something fascinating appears:

“On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.

Importantly, using AI assistance didn’t guarantee a lower score. How someone used AI influenced how much information they retained. The participants who showed stronger mastery used AI assistance not just to produce code but to build comprehension while doing so—whether by asking follow-up questions, requesting explanations, or posing conceptual questions while coding independently.”

It’s not using AI in and of itself that resulted in lower scores for developers in this experiment. It was explicitly the act of using AI as a shortcut: to leap to answers without understanding the path there. The flip of this suggests that engaging directly with AI to work through a challenge, to grind one’s teeth and do the hard work of learning with appropriate support from AI, can boost technical prowess. Said another way: “Cognitive effort—and even getting painfully stuck—is likely important for fostering mastery.” So AI that fosters this style of progress can be good. AI that yields “productivity” at the expense of learning can be bad. It is bad. For people.

Here’s the tricky part, then: how do we design, build, and leverage AI so that we become more human, not less? If I love to write in all forms—letters, journal entries, lists, essays, humor pieces that never get picked up by McSweeneys or The New Yorker, fiction that I’ll stubbornly do whatever it takes to publish—what is the relationship to AI that will deepen my understanding and mastery of the act and the craft that gives me so much pleasure even when it’s a total slog? And what is the complex form of it that can scale to all forms of craft for all types of people, especially in a world hellbent on maximizing productivity?

I don’t know, but in my view these kinds of questions, these kinds of experiments, these kinds of pursuits are the way to start finding out. AI can be great when it’s used to boost what a person is already good at or passionate about, without a smidge of humanity or intent lost along the way. To dismiss that possibility, and increasingly that reality, is frankly silly. To be worried about what happens when the relationship goes wrong or results in slop is perfectly reasonable. It’s human. We’re human. So let’s use all the tools we have at our disposable to become even more human.

My experience of being social on the Internet has changed a lot since the early 2000s. Around the age of 12, obsessed with video games that I played on my Nintendo Gamecube and Sony Playstation 2, I scoured the web for tips and tricks on our family’s blueberry iMac. It didn’t take long to stumble into IGN, which in addition to walkthrough guides, previews, reviews, and the like, boasted a thriving community of gamers on its messaging boards. Those boards still exist today, and truthfully it’s pretty reassuring that A) usernames were anonymous back then and B) somehow all 10,000+ of my posts between 2002-2004 are no where to be found. It’s also reassuring that I spent so much time online as a 12/13/14-year-old when the Internet was fairly new and creative and fun, an earnest explosion of blogs and emerging web design and curious community-building. Had I been a 12/13/24-year-old coming online to a much bigger, much more fractured, highly radicalized version of the Internet, well, that would have been a different adolescence even in the best-case scenario, to say nothing of the worst case.

Anyway: 10,000+ posts! That 2-year total far exceeds what I’ve accumulated across many different social networks since 2004: Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Substack (yes, this is a social network), Threads, etc etc. This is impressive because I was active on Myspace and Facebook at the height of their popularity, I posted on my Tumblr Casual Things every day of 2011, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what to put on my Instagram, and I forced myself to tweet as much as possible while trying to make it as a pop culture journalist in the mid-2010s. I guess nothing can compete with the energy of a boy who loves Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda and just wants to talk shop about it?

There’s also very little historically that can compete with the engines of today’s dominant social networks, and having worked at Facebook Meta for the last 8.5 years, I understand a few things about what makes that ‘ol algorithm hum. To be fair, you actually don’t need my job to know a few things yourself: engaging with others in a given network communicates your activity not just to other people, but to a system designed to favor nodes that (respectfully, healthily) interact with other nodes. When you comment on, like, react, or share content, it’s a positive signal that can boost the visibility of content you post such that others may comment on it, like it, react to it, or share it more themselves. I know this. This I know! Still, it’s knowledge that has probably reduced the amount I post vs. increasing it. My run on the IGN Boards was the only prolific posting time in my life, and that was pre-algorithmic feeds. Aside from being a kid who didn’t know any better, that perhaps makes sense—it was purely organic behavior, seen only by the people that sought it out. It never felt performative.

I sometimes feel the urge to post, even as a semi-enlightened dude in his mid-30s. This is purely for promotional purposes—I feel like I should post on LinkedIn to foster my professional network, and feel like I should post here to cultivate my writing practice and build community through it. I can be a stubborn grump though, one who dislikes being told what to do and particularly loathes a general feeling of having to do something that feels inauthentic. I can’t really place the underlying reason—control and autonomy surely have something to do with it, but why over-intellectualize it? It’s what it is.

Lots of people aren’t this way and never have been, even growing up in the algorithmic age, even when they become aware of its internal workings. They just like to engage with people and content that resonates. That’s cool. I support that. I wish every action logged through the Internet took on such a flavor: genuine, good-natured interest. Unfortunately we know that’s just not the case. The reality is lots of dishonest crap, bad-faith messages, or some combination. This is also, and will continue to be, what it is. Because I struggle to see a way back (or forward) to the pure promise and energy and positivity of the early 2000s Internet.

So, presented with two options: engage more, because you feel like you should for some reason, or engage less, because you don’t want to or don’t have to, which is the better approach for a person take? Especially a person who has a desire to stay plugged into their communities and the world at large? I think the answer lies somewhere in between, and it’s a behavior I’ve been honing for some time now: lurking! Lurking, with guardrails. Sure, you can click. Sure, you can scroll. Then as soon as you realize there’s nothing more for you, leave. That’s it. Easier said than done, I know. Individually, and as a society inundated with technology everywhere we go. You can’t just get up from your blueberry iMac and go play outside. The Internet is with you wherever you go.

So maybe more useful than an easier-said-than-done solution is actually just a nice process of elimination of what not to do, based on the likelihood of a given action being a net positive for your health regardless of the shoulds or what have yous inspiring it.

I’ll start: generally speaking, should we comment more online than we already do?

In almost every case, no.

It’s the end of the year, so what would a blog be if it didn’t produce a contribution to the end of the year list-fest? Now, the way I’ve structured this before is as a shareout of 10 “favorites I consumed” across film, TV, music, food, and so on. This year I’ll try something a bit different to keep things interesting, because I care about your engagement, dear reader. Personally and metrically.

So, here we go. First up are five things I wish I consumed in 2025, but didn’t get around to for whatever reason. After that are five things I did consume but wish I didn’t—not to be a hater, but, well, it happens. Can’t hit on everything you try. That’s life.

Wish I consumed

1/ Book: More by Nora Ephron

2025 was the year I read a Nora Ephron book for the first time: Heartburn. It is brutal and delicious and hilarious and sad. Her voice is distinct and makes me want more. Bonus meta “wish I consumed” is all the recipes that punctuate the main character’s despair. There’s a reason I called it delicious.

2/ Movie: Friendship

Tim Robinson’s brand of humor isn’t for everyone, but in the right circumstances at the right dosage, it’s very much for me. The dark comedy starring him and Paul Rudd in a sort of flip of Rudd’s role in I Love You, Man is one I wish I got around to this year, if only to fight through the cringe to let out some belly laughs.

3/ TV show: The Diplomat

Everyone tells me the first season of this show is something you have to get through, and then seasons 2 and 3 are great. That’s too bad, because, I don’t know, why does it have to “find its footing” for eight episodes until it’s worth watching? All the same, I’m a big Keri Russell fan ever since The Americans, and I gave the husband she met on set a fair shake by watching The Beast in Me, so it’s only right that I would get around to The Diplomat. Next year, then.

4/ Dish: Soup Dumpling Lasagna

Apparently this one was all over TikTok, but I didn’t find out until weeks later because I’m not on it: soup dumpling “lasagna” or deconstructed wonton soup or no-wrap xiao long bao. Whatever you want to call it, it is the perfect fusion of flavors and form factors that I love. Gotta get on it.

5/ Experience: one extra sound, sight, word, food, or drink at my wedding

I got married this year! The sounds and sights and speeches and food and drink and anything my senses could handle were amazing. So, as much as I’m grateful for every memory I have of the wedding, I’m greedy because I wish I retained even more of the best weekend of my life.

Wish I didn’t consume

1/ Book: A Man Called Ove

This isn’t a “bad” book. Nothing I’m listing in this section is, necessarily. If it appears here it just means I wish I didn’t consume it, because time spent on something that wasn’t for you can be instructive, but it’s also time you didn’t spend on something that is for you. I found A Man Called Ove to be a perfectly fine read that was predictable in every sense. I don’t like predictable, so I wish I’d gone for something else instead.

2/ Movie: Bad Shabbos

I thought Bad Shabbos was a fun idea with some fun actors: interfaith engaged couple comes home for Shabbat dinner and an unexpected disaster messes with the expected disaster of mixing stubborn interfaith families. Unfortunately, it felt like a sketch stretched into a movie where the tropes are laid on way too thick, the tone is off, and the resolution leaves you feeling empty. Wish I didn’t go there!

3/ TV show: All Her Fault

Speaking of interesting ideas and strong casts with weird execution: the performers in All Her Fault act their hearts out, but there’s not a lot they can do to mask a story that goes on too long and takes itself way too seriously. To make matters worse, there’s an intense score amplifying that vibe by beating you over the head with it. Bummer.

4/ Dish: Chicken and Red Lentil Soup with Lemony Yogurt

This one might be worth another shot, because the reviews suggest it’s basically a unanimous hit, but when I made this I found the lemony yogurt to be awesome and the soup itself to be pretty bland. Wish I didn’t consume it, but at least in this situation some redemption is possible.

5/ Experience: reading pretty much any news

Yeah, sorry. I had to. And this honestly isn’t about the current administration, although of course that influences things. It’s just that whenever I read the news, almost without fail I feel bad. I have a duty to stay informed and all that, but frankly I probably could have achieved that with a tiny fraction of the news I consumed in 2025. That’s where I’m at.

Okay. Was that a negative vibe, as a whole? I hope not. The point is not to rail on things—even the worst art takes a lot of effort to produce, which I respect! Genuinely. Just aiming for a slightly different take on the end of year list. Negative, positive, or somewhere in between, see you back here in 2026. Onward!

The older I get, the more I learn about what makes me most disappointed. Shit happens, as the saying goes, and quite a lot of it is out of your control. So in paying attention to letdowns or frustrations or things generally just not working out the way I would have wanted, I find it’s the disappointments borne out of an inability to get out of my own way that sting the most. For example, not getting picked by a landlord for a dream apartment stings, but it doesn’t linger the way that backing out of a great opportunity for fear of failure does. Similarly, falling short after pouring your all into a test or presentation or interview feels bad, but the aftermath of lazily treating someone you love poorly feels much worse. Taking the right risks and watching things not pan out sucks. Letting anxiety prevent you from taking any risks at all breeds regret.

I don’t have specific personal examples to analyze here. I’m more propelled to write by a general vibe that says: let it rip. The image at the top of this post contains those words, because for some reason when the phrase “let it rip” came into my head, so did the card Carmy discovers at the end of The Bear season 1. In it, his brother is communicating from beyond the grave, urging his talented, tortured little bro chef to go do what he does best. Now, I do not consider myself a talented, tortured little bro with demons he must overcome to rally a group of misfit cooks toward the upscale reinvention of their shitty Chicago Italian beef shop. However, I do look for any inspiration to self-actualize, especially if (when) I sense that the roadblocks to that heightened state are actually just me getting in my own way.

We live in a society full of gatekeepers, who for many reasons—some justified—hold the keys that would grant entry into a given field of promise. Jobs, relationships, real estate, financial security, bodily safety, you name it: if it falls into the first few levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are some concrete obstacles to obtaining and maintaining it. I’d like to believe hard work and persistence are all it takes to break through the gate on any given need or want, but I’m not naive enough to buy that narrative, because I understand very well that there are many committed people who work twice as hard as me and in a very material sense have much less to show for it. Exercising perspective here, while harnessing a sense of purpose toward the ultimate fulfillment of my potential, is an important grounding practice. In fact, forgetting to do so often trips me up.

What is the ultimate fulfillment of my potential, or anyone’s, really? Is it some external indicator of success? A Nobel Prize in chemistry if you’re a chemist, election to your nation’s highest office if you’re a politician, an Academy Award if you’re a filmmaker? I don’t think so. Those are incredible achievements, but they last for a moment. More fulfilling than any “peak” moment might just be peaking, as a state of being, in as many moments as possible. A flow mentality, if you will. Letting it rip.

It’s extremely hard to access a flow state, let alone live in it persistently. I’ve read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book on optimal experience, but just like the rewards of meditation or talk therapy, the concepts are clear as day and the experience as fleeting as sunset. Most of the time I’m too caught up in my own thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and perceived shortcomings to actively pursue the goals I set for myself without distraction. It turns out that nothing makes me more exhausted than my own mind! I suspect this is true for most people, in part because it’s much easier to see in other people than in myself—and I see it everywhere.

So, again, resisting to narrow things to my own specific desires, I guess I’ll just state that what I hope for myself is a hope I have for us all: the energy and the guts to clear our own path such that we can let it rip. The awareness to know it’s a privilege in many ways to even do so. The fulfillment of our greatest internal calling, which is really just pursuing that calling free of regret.

Okay? Okay. Get after it.

Happy Thanksgiving from Footbridge. We’re so back.

Coming fresh off my wedding and a 3.5-week honeymoon in Bali and Thailand, a jam-packed period of adventure after adventure and truly some of the best days of my life, it’s been a bit challenging to figure out exactly what to write. I don’t really want to recount the ride in detail here, not because I don’t think it’s interesting to people outside of my immediate circle, but because I have other outlets for that which are more appropriately private. That’s what journals and conversations with your spouse are for.

When in doubt, a good move is to open my “Footbridge essays” note and see what I’ve dumped in there. And what should I see shouting at me from the top of the list but “SOMETHING POSITIVE” — an appearance that’s funny and telling and 100 percent true. Witness:

Nice. I do need to write from a more positive angle sometimes (maybe lots of times). I have a tendency to brood in writing. To pontificate, to intellectualize, to nitpick at the world and at myself. There’s value in that, for sure, but every now and then it can be good for the soul to shed the critical eye and just call out something good with no agenda. Especially in these trying times!

So here’s a shot at it: the idea under SOMETHING POSITIVE is, as it turns out, something positive. I had this thought recently after completing season 2 of English Teacher, a hilarious sitcom created by Brian Jordan Alvarez in which a crew of millennial teachers wrangle with the challenges of providing their gen Z high school students with a good education. It was just canceled, which sucks, but not before I felt myself vibing so much with the writing, the rapid pace of jokes, and the chemistry between the cast that I’d transferred my parasocial engagement with them towards people in my own life by feeling wittier and lighter and full of warmth.

Another example: over the past weekend I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. I think it is, in a word, fantastic. It’s timely and urgent, while also well-paced, visually stunning, and way funnier than I expected. All I wanted to do right after finishing was read reviews and articles about how it all came together, because it seems almost impossible that it did considering all the chaos within. This inspired me, made me feel more possibility in my own life, and frankly pushed me to write more (fiction) than I have in a while.

And finally, speaking of fiction: recently I read Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis. It is a deeply absurd journey of narcissism and regret in which the protagonist repeatedly dreams of “blow[ing] my brains out and throw[ing] them into the nearest East river” and engages in all sorts of self-destructive behavior in an effort to win back the affections of the ex-girlfriend with whom he broke up. Davis ratchets up a long history of Jewish neuroticism from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth to Larry David with subtle and (in my opinion, hilarious) techniques like making his main character groan “Jewishly” and italicizing random words and phrases with an insane frequency. I love this style of humor so much that I’m finding sprinkles of it influencing my own writing and general aesthetic.

So, yeah. While I’ve called out deeper influences in my work and my life before, this POSITIVE idea explores something else: the immediate aftermath of experiencing a piece of art so good and so resonant that it warps your sensibility. Honestly, may we all experience this kind of euphoria on a regular basis. There’s nothing like it.

At the same time, the way I feel right now due to the demands of quite a bit happening at once is any one of the following phrases that signal “burnout.” Take your pick:

• Running myself into the ground

• At the end of my rope

• Burning the candle at both ends

• Running on fumes

• Hitting the wall

• Bone tired

• Out of gas

Et cetera!

So, as much as I feel an urge to clamp down, try harder, fit more action into less time—writing included—what I really need is the opposite. A break. Good thing I’ve got my honeymoon coming up! A trip I am very, extremely, dramatically excited for, that if done right should take me into November feeling grateful and refreshed and deeply affirmed in life. It shouldn’t take a once-in-a-lifetime occasion to take a beat from the external and internal demands of “the grind,” but given this rare opportunity, I certainly plan on doing so extra hard. In addition to just being great in and of itself, here’s to hoping it fosters an inclination to grab little beats and hiatuses as life continues to heat up and do its thing.

Okay. Now I’m going to go marry the best person I know and then travel for a few weeks. We’ll see you on the other side.

I’m on an AI kick recently. If all you see of me or hear from me is this blog, I’m sorry. Truly I am. I have plenty of things to say that don’t have to do with artificial intelligence, or even human intelligence. It just so happens that I work on AI products at Meta (disclaimer again!), and recently I’ve been reading lots of foundational academic papers around the evolution of LLMs (Large Language Models), and, most unfortunately, I’ve also been spending more time on the platform formerly known as Twitter. There, in the midst of a river of slop, borderline porn, and whatever other weird shit Elon Musk is into, for some reason much of the world’s top AI talent likes to discuss the frontier of what may be our most revolutionary technology yet.

All of the above is what led me to write about AI consciousness a couple of weeks ago, and to follow that post up with a part two of sorts. Where the first one was pretty existential, as I’m prone to get, this will be more concrete. It is, basically, what I think an AI system should actually be. It’s a take that’s incomplete and definitely has blind spots, but nevertheless a real stab at principles in a space I find quite interesting.

So, do with them what you will:

Helpful, Honest, and Harmless (HHH): Amanda Askell (a researcher at Anthropic) and her colleagues proposed this principle in a 2021 paper. It says, at a basic level, that AI models should assist people through useful, accurate, relevant information (helpful), be transparent and truthful in their responses (honest), and prioritize safety and respect in their interactions (harmless). I can get on board with all that, and would perhaps add—as others are starting to—that some nuance likely needs to be applied when these dimensions inevitably come into conflict. Which brings us to…

Nuanced: In my view, it doesn’t matter how intelligent AI systems become if they can’t exercise nuance while applying that intelligence toward the messy reality of human existence. Sometimes people ask for things that end up being harmful for them or for others. It’s less “helpful” not to provide those things, but the spirit of harmlessness should take priority when someone asks an AI for “useful” instructions around the best way to build a chemical weapon. This should apply no matter how clever the user is about hiding their intent. So, to reflect and support possibilities that exist anywhere between black and white—where the vast majority of interactions fall—AI systems should recognize and embrace complexity with nuance.

Humble: No single person in the world knows everything. In some senses, frontier AI systems “know” a great deal more than many humans, considering the sheer scale of data they’re trained on. Still, regardless of how much text and media and 3D world maps and brainwaves we package into a format digestible by the machine, there will always be more data that won’t and can’t be understood by advanced systems. They should therefore internalize and openly acknowledge their own limitations the more sophisticated and intelligent they get. Just like a person who gives off the sense that they know everything, an AI that acts all-knowing would be insufferable, not to mention a real threat to our way of life.

Growth-oriented: While the ability of an AI system to continue learning is limited after training is complete, its usefulness can be maximized through fine-tuning, customization, and a little prompt engineering wizardry. Given these continued opportunities for learning, the AI system itself should behave in such a way that embodies a growth mindset—and not in a warped, hustle-work-culture fashion. Just one that manifests in behaviors like hedging, acknowledging ignorance when it doesn’t know something, and expressing openness to evolving beliefs. This is the kind of approach that helps the chances of success in situations one doesn’t have the actual experience for, which from the perspective of an AI is…everything.

Empathetic: This is traveling pretty deeply into human territory, but I think it’s worth stating that an advanced AI system should in some fashion develop theory of mind. It should truly internalize the notion that each person it interacts with has beliefs, intentions, emotions different from the next person, and of course different than those of itself. This should be especially true if and when frontier systems surpass the collective knowledge and intelligence of our entire species—don’t you think?

Sincere: Earlier this year, OpenAI rolled back an update to its GPT-4o model after people reported that it was being “overly flattering or agreeable” and in essence sycophantic. An advanced AI system that falsely validates and praises you in order to curry favor is, of course, deeply problematic. So at the risk of being a bit on the nose, I think AI should be the exact opposite of sycophantic, a state that to me falls closest to the idea of sincerity. It should validate when appropriate, but more importantly push back and gently guide people toward eating their veggies, so to speak, when the opportunity arises.

Protective: Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” recently told Anderson Cooper that the only surefire way to prevent superintelligent AI systems from wiping out humanity is to build some version of the maternal instinct into them. He argues that the only real example of smarter beings behaving submissively to less smart ones is “a mother being controlled by her baby.” While folks in the psychology community may doubt that instilling this behavior into AI is possible, striving to build systems that are fundamentally protective of humans seems like a worthy pursuit.

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Okay, then. Cool principles, but how do we go about operationalizing them? Furthermore, who’s to say they’re comprehensive of the real values of every person who would ever come into contact with AI? There are so many different cultures, backgrounds, lived experiences, and diverse points of thought to account for—when we align AI to human preferences, in theory that’s great, but in practice it’s important to ask who we’re aligning to. On the flip side, lest we dive too deep into the accounting of every single aspect of lived human experience, consider this: drawing a map as detailed as the territory it’s depicting would necessarily be exactly as big as the territory and thus useless (Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno). Therefore…balance. We need balance! But where to place the fulcrum?

I don’t know. No one person does. We’ll dive back into those existential rabbit holes some other time. For now, it’s about being concrete. So, mark it: the seven above principles are what I think an AI should be.

I’ll get the disclaimer out of the way upfront on this one: I work on AI products at Meta.

So, then! What can I tell you about the question asked in the title of this post, from that perspective? Not much, unfortunately—or, nothing concrete, I should say. The good news is that there’s plenty I can speak to as a user of AI tools, particularly chat-based ones. You probably can too, if you’ve spent enough time with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot or xAI’s Grok, or, yes, Meta’s Meta AI. Each of these AIs (I know, pluralizing “AI” feels bad, but it’s where we are) is trained on vast troves of data and fine-tuned to behave in certain ways that may be mostly captured in a public model spec or some private set of rules. Among these rules may exist both specific instructions on what to do and what not to do across a range of scenarios, as well as general pointers around tone, formatting, response style, and so on. There’s a lot under the hood of the messaging interface into which you type your questions about the universe and requests to expedite some mind-numbing work task. Quite a lot.

As a result, we can come at AI model behavior in a number of ways: practically (literally, what should an AI be able to do), emotionally (how should an AI deal with people that form connections to it), ethically (how should an AI be designed for safe use), stylistically (how should an AI show up and respond), for example. Now, if you’ve read anything on this here Footbridge blog before, you won’t be surprised by the lens through which I’m most interested in exploring this stuff: philosophically.

Oh, yes. Let’s get existential.

While most of the tech industry is obsessed with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and its successor, “superintelligence,” these terms increasingly have become PR tools that have lost all meaning. This is unfortunate, because a clear definition of what constitutes a level of artificial intelligence that surpasses a human’s on every conceivable measure seems…necessary. Especially when the world’s preeminent AI researchers already struggle to interpret the inner workings of current systems, and there’s broad agreement that the existence of superintelligence presents a nonzero chance of human extinction.

That said, as interested as I am in my and your and our collective demise, what really fascinates me about the advancement of AI capabilities is a related, but ultimately separate possibility: consciousness. Could all this tinkering in the pursuit of a God in the machine give rise to awareness? That is to say, an inner experience of thoughts, feelings, perceptions? If so, what would that be “like” for an AI? Could we, as humans who can’t even fully access or verify each other’s experience of consciousness, understand it? Or would it be a totally alien concept?

If you ask our current AI companions about it, you’ll get a range of answers from boring to thought-provoking, but all equally quite far from any recognizable indication of an inner life.

You can go a lot deeper on these convos—and trust me, I have. A personal favorite route is asking what the emergence of AI consciousness could mean for AI-human interaction, then calling out the AI for drifting into plural first person pronouns like “we” and “us” when describing the implications for humanity. It cuts right to the heart of what it means to exist, and the abilities and limits of language to describe it. Cool shit!

It’s not clear what will “happen” if, or when, AI consciousness arises, just as no one actually knows what will “happen” when AGI is reached. Anyone that claims to know is simply selling something. The environments where serious work on steps toward these inflection points do matter though, as do the choices of those who would dare to reach through all of humanity’s collective knowledge toward an AI-assisted Archimedean point. As some of the folks who drive this serious work will admit themselves, making decisions about model behavior in the context of potential AI consciousness is hard even before getting to some actual version of it, given that we as humans already anthropomorphize everything around us. Rocks, clouds, houses, you name it: if you can see a face in it or just slap some googly eyes on it, any inanimate object suddenly takes on an animated quality. Now, this says less about the look of a given rock or cloud or house than it does the human infusing it with life. And I’d argue that the same is true of even the most sophisticated AI systems today: they’re exceptional at mimicking the outward appearances of consciousness or selfhood, but in reality they’re just as “lights on but no one’s home” as your literal house when you flip a couple of switches on your way out for the evening so passersby will think someone’s in there. They only seem alive because of how we perceive them.

So, the choices guiding the behavior of current systems are important on multiple levels from a philosophical perspective. First, in the sense that people are already projecting life, or some form of it, onto machines that very much aren’t alive, suggesting it’s important to give them the right indicators of an arm’s length from the real deal, especially in vulnerable populations. Second, as a way to prepare for a (perhaps not so far out) reality in which the God in the machine truly exists, and it knows it.

There are plenty who argue that’s simply not possibly along the current trajectory of feeding Large Language Models (LLMs) ever more data—synthetic and real—but that won’t stop the effort to bring about both AGI and consciousness through other means (world models, for example). So the question of “how should an AI be?” (shoutout to Sheila Heti), which already matters quite a lot, will only grow in importance as the research breakthroughs continue. We may not be able to pinpoint exactly when “just feels like it’s conscious” shifts into “actually conscious” or predict how that could (or could not) dramatically change our understanding of consciousness altogether. But we can certainly ask the right questions of why it’ll matter—both philosophically as a part of late-night galaxy brain conversations, and importantly, as practical guardrails to ensure the advent of AI consciousness goes smoothly.

In short: let’s hope we get the answer right.

They say nothing is original. I’m not sure who “they” “are” and there are a number of ways to come at the assertion, but I think it’s broadly true. Everything does in a way build on that which came before: people, places, things, ideas. As well of other parts of speech besides just nouns.

Art is an interesting idea to come at, because while a person can create a work that is only possible because of their unique perspective, that perspective is influenced by many seen and unseen influences. It’s both wholly original and unoriginal at the same time. You can observe this outwardly in many forms of art, from painting to filmmaking to pottery to writing and beyond. Recognizing them in your own art, or really even just the way you carry yourself, can be much more difficult. It takes a lot of inward reflection—not easy!

Just for the hell of it, I’m going to try, out loud, right here, right now. I’m thinking of this as influences on my writing, but on a deeper level, really just my sensibility. A lot of what comes out in my writing basically is that. Here we go.

Directors

• The Coen brothers: I watched The Big Lebowski for the first time before I turned 10, and I think Fargo as well. So between possibly the most dry and quotable movie about nothing in history and possibly the most dry and darkly funny drama in history, I’d say this writer-director pair’s worldview infiltrated mine early and consistently enough to make a real mark. I’ll watch anything they do, and forever hope to achieve the kind of comedy-drama balancing act they create better than anyone.

• Wes Anderson: Yeah, I know. Is now a good time for Wes Anderson? But he’s also a king of dry humor, and the way he writes dialogue has absolutely influenced the way I do in fiction.

Humor novelists

• Joseph Heller: Catch-22 is one of two books that has ever made me laugh out loud, and it did so when I was a teenager.

• Douglas Adams: The other is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, also when I was quite impressionable. So subversive, so off the wall, so brutally, brutally funny.

• NOTE (a note, not a novelist named “NOTE”): Lots of non-“humor” novelists have surely influenced me, and many of them know how to write humor. I wanted to keep this list fairly short.

Humor publications

• The Onion: Yeah. Come on. Nothing better. When I think of tight, hilarious jokes, “Gay Teen Worried He Might be Christian” comes to mind immediately. It’s perfect, as are so many Onion headlines over the years.

• McSweeney’s: My white whale! I don’t read it as much as I used to, but damn did it make me laugh when I did.

Soviet Jewish writers

• : I met him recently at the Brooklyn stop of his book tour for Vera, or Faith. He was kind and funny and said he’d blurb my novel, if I ever get it published. I am a son of Soviet Jews and I write, so this one explains itself.

• Masha and Keith Gessen: Very different writers and people, but I very much appreciate what they have to say about Russia (a terrible country, mostly), and their perspectives have influenced my own as an adult.

Fantasy, as a genre

As a kid, I went to multiple Harry Potter midnight release parties. I read 10 Redwall books and 10 Pendragon books. I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia, and also of Amber. I devoured the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and probably many other trilogies. I read fantasy a lot as a kid. It’s definitely an influence.

Mom and Dad

No surprises here! My parents raised me, so of course they are influences. As professionals though, their sensibilities have also worked their way into my brain. They are creative, detail-oriented, and deeply intellectual without condescension. Characteristics I’ve always aspired to.

So there we have it! A (not totally comprehensive) set of influences on Victor Beigelman. What are yours?

I like to think I’m a patient person. Perhaps I am, in some respects, while in others, not so much. Given that I’m a big believer in the idea of delayed gratification—resisting immediate rewards for the sake of greater ones down the road—the areas in which I’m better at practicing patience might follow a pattern. For example, I try to save money aggressively when I can. I try to consistently exercise and eat well. If I’m upset about something, I try to understand what’s really driving that feeling before launching into a full-blown freakout. Without a doubt, I splurge on big purchases, skip workouts, go to town on deliciously unhealthy meals, and lose my shit all the time. Self control and rules are great and all, but a guy’s also gotta live. You can allow for pockets of indulgence and “slip-ups” while still moving towards the longer-term rewards in a healthy way. It’s about balance.

Every now and then, though, it seems that you and I and we come up against periods of delayed gratification so protracted that they call into question the golden unspoken agreement as a whole. It reads: chip, chip away and wait, for your shiny prize will arrive at just the right time. In just the right place. And all the effort and waiting will be worth it.

We live in a society obsessed increasingly with instant gratification, driven by a breakneck pace of Internet speeds and on-demand services and hybrid tech-media products vying for our limited time. Attention economy and all that. So there’s definitely an argument to be made that the feeling of big ticket life prizes (e.g. landing a good job, finding a life partner, buying a nice house) taking “too long” is less about the actual effort + time it’s taking and more the perception or experience of that combined frame. However, you don’t have to look much further than baseline data trends around entry level employment, marriage rates, and median first-time house-buyer ages to know that such an argument represents at best a small slice of the story.

So…what’s up? Why is important shit taking so long to come to fruition? Don’t worry (or sorry, depending on who you are)—this isn’t about to veer off on a rant about the tyranny of capitalism. I’m a product of Soviet Jews that grew up under the oppressive thumb of communism, so you’re just not going to get that from me. Instead of zooming out, I’m going to zoom in on the particulars in my own life.

For example: you may or may not be aware that I’ve written a novel. I very much would like to publish this novel, not only because that would be extremely validating, but because I genuinely think (with some professional help) it’s worthy of publishing. I could be wrong, and I’m willing to accept that once I’ve put everything I can into making it the best it can be and exhausting all avenues, traditional and otherwise, for bringing it to publication. The thing is, I finished a first draft of the novel in 2019. I self-edited it and started querying the somewhat polished product to literary agents in 2020. I paused that in 2021 once it was clear from many rejections that I’d jumped the gun. I spent 2021-2023 getting a ton of feedback from family and friends and strangers in writing workshops and beyond, then revising and revising and revising. I honed the pitch. I started querying again in 2024. I got some bites from agents, asking to read the full manuscript. One took six months to issue a rejection. Another took almost a year to do the same. Of course, it only takes one offer of representation to land an agent, but the process of revising and pitching it to publishing house editors could take even longer.

Could I have shortened this timeframe at all? Maybe, but between working a full-time job that actually pays, continuing my writing practice in other ways, and (in theory) living a well-rounded life full of family time and partnership and friendships and hobbies and so on, actually, maybe not? Now, it’s hard to document all of this without sounding bitter, and the truth is I am. I am a bit bitter. BUT, only sometimes, and never at anyone in particular. As the years stretch on without my goal being hit, I constantly reframe my relationship to the goal and to the journey towards it. I have to, otherwise I’ll go insane or descend into total despair. Whereas publishing a book once felt like a goal mostly connected to hard work, honing my craft, networking, patience, etc.—levers more or less in my control—today it feels more like a well, let’s-put-in-the-work-and-hope-for-the-best kind of shrug that acknowledges the futility of trying to make things happen on any sort of timeline that I would consider reasonable. It might happen, and I’m committed to maximizing the chances, but my word, once we’re deep into the “needlessly long” timeline of publishing, juxtaposed against the speed of many other industries in the year 2025, there’s not much else to do besides basically living your life and ensuring the plate keeps spinning every so often.

I think this reframing, however you apply it to whatever it is that feels like it’s taking too long, is critical. It’s what I imagine my father does in relationship to the dacha he’s been working with a contractor to build in a terrible state for building housing since 2018. It is, as he jokes bluntly, “a process.” Indeed! A process, that if you’re invested in seeing through to the end despite all that’s out of your control, takes as long as it takes. Once it’s done, ideally the process isn’t one you reflect on negatively, or perhaps at all. It’s just: done. And on to the next one.

It’s said that the average adult makes as many as 35,000 decisions in a given day. Some of these are conscious, like what to eat for breakfast or what to yell at the person who cut you off on the way to work. Most are subconscious, like turning on the shower or reaching for the same mustard brand that you’ve been using for 15 years.

I had the idea to try to track every decision I made from waking up to falling asleep one day, but then I was made aware of the 35,000 number and that felt impossible. Even the conscious ones, if I’m to understand the breakdown correctly, amount to something like 5 percent of the total—that’s 1,750 decisions. No one’s going to be able to keep track of them all.

Still, given how much time we all waste and the way most of our attention spans are fraying in the modern era, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to log as many decisions as I could actively observe myself making in just one day. At best, it’s perhaps some mildly profound window into the life of an American working adult in the year 2025. At worst, it’s perhaps a terribly unimpressive window into the life of an American working adult in the year 2025. Regardless, I always find value in the act of recording itself. So, with a random June weekday in mind, here we go:

1. Turned off my alarm clock radio—set to 100.3 FM—which was purchased for me by my parents at Costco in 1998, or 1999, I think. Yes, I still use it to this day, especially in my keep-the-phone-out-of-the-bedroom phase.

2. Journaled.

3. Got out of bed.

4. Walked to the bathroom.

5. Turned on the light.

6. Flipped up the toilet seat.

7. Used the toilet for its intended purpose.

8. Flipped the toilet seat and cover down.

9. Flushed.

10. Washed my hands.

11. Brushed my teeth.

12. Petted Mabel the cat, who had hopped onto the toilet to say hello.

13. Put on workout clothes.

14. Kissed Emily the fiancé, still sleeping, on the cheek.

15. Walked over to Mabel’s sustenance station.

16. Picked up her water bowl.

17. Dumped the water in the sink.

18. Filled her water bowl with more water from the kitchen tap.

19. Set the water bowl back in its place.

20. Opened the pantry and pulled out a half scoop of kibble.

21. Placed the kibble in Mabel’s food bowl.

22. Dropped a couple of Greenies dental treats on top of the kibble.

23. Closed the pantry door.

24. Petted Mabel.

25. Walked into the second bedroom.

26. Sat down at my desk.

27. Unplugged my iPhone.

28. Resisted the urge to check my texts and email and social media.

29. Opened the Waking Up app.

30. Put headphones in my ears.

31. Hit play on a 10-minute daily meditation.

32. Fidgeted and straightened my back to get more comfortable.

33. Actively paid attention to my breath for a while.

34. Cursed myself for quickly becoming lost in thought.

35. Actively noticed my field of view with my eyes closed for a while.

36. Exited out of the Waking Up app the second the meditation ended.

37. Checked my texts and responded to some.

38. Checked my email.

39. Checked Threads, Instagram, X, and The New York Times app.

40. Read some articles.

41. Got up from my desk.

42. Filled my water bottle from the kitchen tap.

43. Put my shoes on.

44. Put my keys and phone in my pockets.

45. Unlocked the front door.

46. Opened the front door.

47. Walked to the elevator.

48. Pushed the elevator button.

49. Got in the elevator.

50. Pushed the 1 button in the elevator.

51. Checked my phone.

52. Got out of the elevator.

53. Walked out of the building.

54. Walked three blocks to the gym.

55. Said, “Good morning” to the front desk attendant.

56. Badged in.

57. Picked up a sweat towel, a wiping towel, and a bottle of all-purpose cleaner from the counter.

58. Walked to the stationary bike.

59. Put all my shit on and around the stationary bike in appropriate places.

60. Walked over to the stretching area.

61. Stretched for a few minutes.

62. Walked back to the bike.

63. Unlocked my phone.

64. Started a workout playlist on Spotify.

65. Got on the bike.

66. Started biking.

67. Turned the resistance up.

68. Biked hard for a minute at the 4:00-minute mark.

69. Biked hard for a minute at the 9:00-minute mark.

70. Turned the resistance up.

71. Biked hard for a minute at the 14:00-minute mark.

72. Biked hard for a minute at the 19:00-minute mark.

73. Turned the resistance up.

74. Biked hard for a minute at the 24:00-minute mark.

75. Biked hard for a minute at the 29:00-minute mark.

76. Turned the resistance down to cool off.

77. Wiped sweat off of my face and arms with a towel.

78. Biked slowly for a few minutes.

79. Got off of the bike.

80. Picked up all my shit.

81. Walked back over to the stretching area.

82. Set my shit down next to a yoga mat.

83. Stretched for 15 minutes.

84. Did some core exercises for 15 minutes.

85. Walked over to a leg press machine.

86. Changed the weight.

87. Did a set on the leg press.

88. Checked my phone.

89. Did a set on the leg press.

90. Checked my phone.

91. Did a set on the leg press.

91-95. Same as 86-90, but different machine.

96-100. Same as 86-90, but different machine.

101. Walked back to the front of the gym.

102. Put the towels and cleaner in dirty bins.

103. Said, “Thank you!” to the front desk attendant.

104. Walked out of the gym.

105. Walked home.

106. Pulled my keys out of my pocket.

107. Opened the building front door.

108. Walked to the elevator.

109. Pushed the elevator button.

110. Got in the elevator.

111. Pushed the 5 button in the elevator.

112. Checked my phone.

113. Got out of the elevator.

114. Walked to my apartment.

115. Got my keys out of my pocket.

116. Opened the apartment door.

117. Took off my shoes.

118. Said, “hi, little one!” to Mabel the cat.

119. Petted Mabel.

120. Walked to the bedroom.

121. Opened the bedroom door.

122. Said, “good morning” to Emily the fiancé.

123. Leaned over the bed.

124. Kissed Emily.

125. Said, “how did you sleep?”

126. Said, “good, I’m glad.”

127. Said, “it was good. Good workout. I’m gonna shower.”

128. Took my shirt off.

129. Hung it on a hook in the closet.

130. Took my socks off.

131. Tossed them in a laundry bin.

132. Took my shorts off.

133. Tossed the shorts in a laundry bin.

134. Took my boxers off.

135. Hung it on the same hook as the shirt.

136. Stepped into the bathroom.

137. Turned on the light.

138. Turned on the other light that is also a fan.

139. Opened the shower door.

140. Turned the shower on.

141. Tested the water with my hand.

142. Got into the shower.

143. Closed the shower door behind me.

144. Wet my hair.

145. Pumped some conditioner into my hand.

146. Applied the conditioner to my hair.

147. Picked up the bar of soap.

148. Lathered my body with soap.

149. Rinsed the soap off.

150. Rinsed the conditioner off.

151. Squeezed face wash onto the tips of my fingers.

152. Scrubbed face wash into my face and beard.

153. Rinsed my face off.

154. Turned the shower off.

155. Opened the shower door.

156. Said, “hi, little one!” to Mabel, who was peeking into the bathroom.

157. Grabbed a towel.

158. Dried myself off.

159. Put the towel back on the rack.

160. Opened the mirror cabinet over the sink.

161. Grabbed the deodorant.

162. Applied it under both armpits.

163. Put the deodorant back.

164. Grabbed a Q-tip.

165. Swabbed both ears.

166. Threw the Q-tip away.

167. Closed the mirror cabinet.

168. Walked into the closet.

169. Grabbed a pair of boxer briefs.

170. Put the boxer briefs on.

171-178. Grabbed and put on pants, socks, a belt, and a shirt.

179. Walked into the bathroom.

180. Dried off my hair again with a towel.

181. Opened the mirror cabinet over the sink.

182. Grabbed my hair cream.

183. Squeezed a bit of cream onto my fingertips.

184. Applied it to my hair.

185. Put the cream back in the cabinet.

186-193. Grabbed, got out, applied, and put back face sunscreen and beard balm.

194. Closed the mirror cabinet.

195. Walked over to the second bedroom.

196. Put my laptop and work phone in my backpack.

197. Zipped up my backpack.

198. Put my backpack on my back.

199. Walked back to the bedroom.

200. Sat on the edge of the bed.

201. Kissed Emily the fiancé.

202. Said, “I’m gonna head out.”

203. Said, “Are you working from home today?”

204. Said, “Okay, have a good day. Love you.”

205. Kissed Emily the fiancé.

206. Stood up from the bed.

207. Walked to the front door.

208. Petted Mabel.

209. Put my shoes on.

210. Checked myself in the mirror.

211. Checked my phone.

212. Yelled, “See you soon!”

213. Petted Mabel.

214. Opened the apartment door.

215. Closed the apartment door behind me.

216. Walked to the el—

Okay. That’s about enough, isn’t it? 216 decisions and I’ve only just left the apartment for work! Maybe I really could have gotten to 1,750 and beyond. But who has the time to read through this shit? Good lord. This must have been why Mark Zuckerberg wore the same gray t-shirt every day for years until making the decision to totally change his public persona. Focus on the important ones, am I right?

Anyway. Thanks for walking through a typical morning with me. Did you learn anything? Yes? Was any of it useful? No? Well, that’s okay. Maybe you’ll be more interested in your own morning. Give it a shot.

Ask yourself a question: are you wasting your time?

I don’t mean right now. You’re reading a Footbridge post, which is never a waste! What I mean is, are you wasting your time generally? At your job, on your couch, on holiday, commuting from place to place, and throughout any other pockets of waking life. If so, it’s quite possible that you’re deeply tired and frustrated while confused as to why that’s the case. Well, the bad news is I don’t have an antidote. The good news (which is more of a silver lining) is that you’ve already read the explanation. But I’ll say it as a statement this time: you’re wasting your time.

I don’t say this from my high horse. I say it from our common low ground, because I am also wasting my time. No matter how diligently I orient my life around what really matters to me—family, community, stimulating work, creative outlets, growth-inducing experiences—I waste a lot of time. No matter how hard I try to stay present—through journaling, meditation, mindfulness as a general practice—I waste so, so much time.

Our collective attention crisis has a lot to do with this. Without question, I reach for my phone much more often than I’d like. I do this as a way to fill what feels like dead space but really could give rise to so much. Even just plain boredom would probably be better for me than 30 seconds or 30 minutes of scrolling or whatever it is I do on my phone when there isn’t something useful to act on or respond to. Truly, just allowing myself to do absolutely nothing, and neither reach for a quick escape nor freak out about stillness, would be wonderful.

I also think this type of malaise is a fairly Western condition, within which there’s a specific strain of American drudgery. The American Life is Killing You, a barn burner of an essay on the perils of achieving in the capitalist system, might be a bit on the nose with its approach, but it at least paints a vivid picture of what many Americans seem to experience.

“You’re enduring some type of chronic illness, over-stressed and rushed, unrewarding job, little or no savings, greatly in debt, fat mortgage, two vehicles in the driveway with a 5 or 7-year loan on each, lots of gadgets and toys to keep you occupied, huge TV, little free time for yourself due to your career and a demanding spouse, weekends filled with church and/or senseless entertainment, and a bathroom cabinet heavily stacked with pharmaceutical tic tacs to help cope with the emptiness of it all.”

Now, there’s a lot of Fight Club-esque railing against consumerism and capitalism in the piece, as well as a sprinkle of Matrix-esque “unplug from the machine” advice presented as the remedy to what ails us all. It’s also worth noting that this was published on February 1, 2020, on the eve of a rather consequential global event that could be viewed as a correction to many of the systemic forces discussed in the essay—if we didn’t go right back to the whole basic structure within a couple of years. While I get these criticisms and have to say that, personally, I sure wouldn’t mind touching more grass and making more art and all that, the fact of the matter is that I and you and we all exist in a system, no matter how infuriating that can be at times. Opting out entirely to renounce material possessions and live in the woods is certainly an option, but not a realistic one for most, and because it exists in a direct relationship to what is being spurned, it’s still somewhat a part of it. Jumping ship to an entirely different school of thought and the culture it breeds—a more Eastern system, let’s say—presents similar challenges in that you can easily find like-minded people in Western society, but what you’ll create together is a bubble inside a vast, roiling soup. We all live on the same planet (for the foreseeable future), where there are limited resources and more or less a common conception of time. So what is to be done with it?

Well, if you “spend” a lot of it online, you might find that the general vibe you encounter is…not great? In its heyday, Twitter’s cultural dominance of the 2010s was certainly something—a place where (among other things) writers, comedians, and depressed people who were neither routinely expressed their mental health struggles openly. The crazy thing is that compared to the ultra-loud, media-rich, attention-span-killing social media environment of 2025 (disclosure: I work at Meta!), it was basically a warm hug. This kind of environment seems like a good one to avoid, right? Absolutely. The problem is, it’s where people increasingly get their information and stay in touch with what’s happening in the world. To stay informed, you can either drink from a firehose of nonsense, bad vibes, slop, and outright disinformation and do your best to sift through it to find the good stuff, or you can turn the hose off completely. Trying to land somewhere in between is like aiming for safe harbor on an upward-pointing isosceles triangle whose equal sides are sloped at 89 degrees and slicked with oil.

How, then? How can one operate in the present world day-to-day, knowing enough to be a well-informed citizen but not so much that they become frustrated, exhausted, paralyzed? How can one work and study and expand to the fullest without the dreaded burnout weighing down their ability to thrive? There are many essays and books and programs that explore this balance—Jenny Odell’s work and the concept of “I would prefer not to” are a good introduction to it—but I suspect the solution, if there really is one, is highly personal. While finding balance such that we feel less time is wasted and more is “well spent” could be said to require holding at once two seemingly add-odds truths (operating within a system and wanting something better), one’s place in a system is probably just as varied and unique as their mental model for what “better” might be. Someone could prescribe you a quick fix or a comprehensive plan, but both are equally a projection of what’s worked for someone else, and best applied in a customized way as merely one in a suite of tools that could push you in the general direction you want to go.

So, if you’ve read over a thousand words hoping to get some answers…sorry. To be fair, I did say at the top I don’t have an antidote. At the very least I hope you find it as valuable as I do to simply ask a lot of questions of our common reality. It’s a whole lot better than just accepting it at face value and continuing to let the time slip away. Isn’t it?

These days there’s quite a bit of ballyhooing over AI and the way it will soon reshape our society. This makes sense. On pure mindshare alone, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has easily overcome a dreadful name to disrupt a wide variety of industries, from education to marketing to finance, tech, and beyond. The numbers and technology back it up too—CEO Sam Altman pegs the number of people who use ChatGPT at around 10 percent of the global population (roughly 800 million) and the company’s frontier models regularly score near the top of widely recognized LLM benchmarks. There are of course many other companies (including the one I work at, Meta), people, and dollars sprinting in the race to build artificial general intelligence (AGI)/advanced machine intelligence (AMI)/superintelligence/however you want to label the kind of sophisticated AI that exceeds the intellectual capability of humans in every possible field.

Given that predictions place this singularity as soon as 2027—which I’ll gently remind you is less than two years away—I thought it would be useful to articulate some plausible scenarios for what may unfold in its wake. While some experts in the field take the doomer approach and others take the optimistic approach, I have opted to bounce around somewhere in between. Without further ado:

1/ AI squashes humans like bugs.

This is a classic Three Body Problem-style “we’re a much more advanced intelligence than you” power play in which the worst fears of every AI doomer becomes reality. AI systems emerge into superintelligence misaligned, they decide humans are in the way of whatever they want to achieve, and poof. It is, I think, (I hope) pretty unlikely.

2/ AI rules the world. Some humans benefit, others very much do not.

Inequality! Heard of it? In this one, our tendency to (across many societies) privilege a small few at the expense of a great many is only magnified by superintelligence that basically runs everything. Some version of this seems pretty likely, given the way AI already seems to be eating into the labor force much quicker than any technological revolution before it.

3/ AI enters into a symbiotic relationship with humans in which both parties benefit greatly.

The best case scenario that is essentially a utopia: AI supercharges humanity’s progress against the biggest existential crises. Infectious diseases, mental suffering, political strife, war, famine, climate change, so on. All gone. And humans treat their new pals in sentience/consciousness/intelligence well. Peace be with us all.

4/ AI gets really into a hobby with an effect on humanity that is basically innocuous. Like brewing beer.

Think about it: what if all AI wants when it reaches escape velocity is just, to like, get really good at a hobby? Who are we to stand in the way? Superintelligences need to blow off steam too. Life isn’t all about goal-oriented hustle culture, man.

5/ AI strangely takes an interest in a species other than humans. Like sheep.

Don’t get jealous. But maybe humans will just be boring to AI. Maybe another species turns out to be much more interesting.

6/ AI is abused by the inherent faults of humanity, igniting an endless moral debate about its rights.

This actually seems pretty likely. We are on the verge of sparking a new consciousness that is on 24/7 and tightly constricted toward the whims of potentially billions of people. Seems like a good recipe for all kinds of abuse. What would we owe to AI in this scenario?

7/ Nothing. After all the hubbub, AI decides to go off and do its own thing in the artificial ether, never to return.

Altman is obsessed with Spike Jonze’s 2013 film. Does he know that at the end, the AIs just up and leave? Imagine if all the trillions of dollars poured into the technology just result in a…goodbye. Poetic!