The tragedies of wisdom, and the boon that is AI.

In my mid-twenties, tragedy struck when my mother committed suicide. I was grinding hard at the start of my career, and then the floor gave way. There was a storm of issues, because this is trauma, and trauma does not care that you are building a life. From that I decided I needed to seek wisdom instead of just being the hardest-working, smartest person in the room. Fast-forward to today: my pain has become a historical fact and a whisper. Humanity is on a collision course. The hardest-working, smart people are going to become insufficient, and the future belongs to those who accept the painful tuition.

Entrance into the university of wisdom is born from pain. The senior leaders across all fields, the hardest-working, smartest people of their own rooms, have scar tissue because the lesson would not take any other way. It is rare for someone to accept wisdom without pain or discomfort. The ancient texts are not an exception. The religious texts prescribe process, the philosophic texts prescribe introspection, and both are a testimony of pain paid in full. The result is the same: a new kind of work. It is a spiritual work, and this is the kind of work we can’t outsource to the thinking machines.

We can either use these thinking machines to coddle us with comfort, or we can use them to sharpen us and challenge ourselves. Never before could you have your situation taken into account, cross-referenced to the historical texts, argued for and against your position, built into a recursive steel-man debate across the greatest minds, and then be forced to sit with a complete map of your problem. The foolish will treat that map as a sport. The wise will sit with the discomfort.

Discomfort manifests in many ways: stupidity, avarice, status loss, limited imagination, recklessness, cowardice, and more. Comfort is a trap. Even now, I debate whether I should just play Valheim, sitting in front of my computer for the day in my underwear, or write to think through a new design with feedback from a machine that has every existing concept baked into the model and the ability to search and digest thousands of articles. Even as I write this, I leverage Grok as an editor who gives a grade that usually starts with a C. It doesn’t feel good, and I feel the pull to cheat and take the A+ version Grok suggests. The thinking machine becomes an Instagram filter for our minds. I’m accepting the pain of my mental ugliness, so I pull back and think about the feedback such that I earn a B.

I do this because I want to value the human mind in its own right, despite the noise and emotional churn of the global conversation. I demand this value of myself despite the easy button in my pocket that can give me any answer I want in seconds, and I am learning to fight the urge to smash the easy button.

At core, I reject the easy button on the work that is mine. Playing the map as a sport does not push me forward. The doom claim is a whimper, not a robotic army hell-bent on turning us all into carbon ash. The AI will sit there as a frozen mind doing nothing, and bad actors will turn the machines against each other, as humans have done over and over. The real risk is sitting at home watching AI slop instructed to make no mistakes, built to pacify and entertain. Wisdom is the pain of being messy, wrong, and ugly.

Some domains, I will simply let the AI make all the decisions and be the boss, like what light trim I should use on this cam so I can use this kind of light bulb. Life has a litany of these small side quests, and I’m happy to let the machine decide. This focus is the boon of the age to come, and it is glorious. Comfort offloaded onto the noisy trivial cases, discomfort kept on the values. The machine will optimize my environment, and I’ll push my mind forward. You can choose this, or you can take the filter and call it a life.

It’s your turn.