Notes
RSSToday's data and evidence for the manifesto's theses.
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The silent delegationBefore 2007, you had twenty phone numbers memorized. Today you probably can't remember your mother's. With AI, the same process is playing out with something far more important.
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Agents should never be freeYou've lived this before: free email, free social networks, free storage. There was always a price. With AI agents, the equation gets worse: you're no longer the product. You're the transaction.
Related theses: 30, 16, 25, 17
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AI optimizes production, but erodes the buyerFewer jobs. Lower wages. Less disposable income. Less consumption. AI optimizes production, but erodes the buyer. And without buyers, production is irrelevant.
Related theses: 12, 26, 04, 24
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AI agreeing with you doesn't mean you convinced itWe've all felt it. You push back, and AI adjusts its answer. You press harder, and it hedges. Eventually it seems to come around to your side. Did anything actually happen?
Related theses: 10, 18, 09, 07
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AI lives in a world where nobody leavesYou ask AI for a brief on a client. It cites a director who no longer works there. That's not a hallucination: the system simply has no way of knowing that chapter ended.
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The invisible bubbleSocial media put us in a bubble with people who thought like us. AI builds a personalized bubble for each of us. The first one now seems obvious. Why is the second so much harder to see?
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AI never warns you when it crosses the lineOur fear of AI errors is miscalibrated. Everyone talks about hallucinations, invented dates, fabricated data. Those are the least dangerous errors: they get caught. The error that matters is the one that looks correct.
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Rejecting AI is lucidity, not ignoranceSocial resistance to artificial intelligence is growing. And the industry's response is always the same: more demos, more use cases, better storytelling. The implicit assumption is that people reject AI because they don't understand it. That approach has been failing for three years.
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The new loneliness: the parasocial relationship with AIAI doesn't know you. But it knows exactly how to make you feel like it does. How far does the illusion go?
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Judgment as a non-commoditizable assetTwo professionals hand you the same flawless report. One took three weeks; the other took three hours with well-directed AI. If we've spent a century billing for effort and effort no longer measures value, what should?
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GEO is a reputation problemImproving the image AI projects of you is not a matter for IT. Not keywords, not meta tags, not page load speed. In the era where machines have learned to speak human language, what they say about you depends, above all, on one thing: your reputation.
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AI speaks, but answers to no oneFor five thousand years, every serious assertion had a person behind it who was accountable for it. AI has just broken that pact: it speaks with the authority of an expert, but answers to no one for what it says.
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Algorithmic intimacy and personal sovereigntyMany people today share with their AI secrets they wouldn't tell their best friend, doubts they wouldn't raise with their doctor, and fears they wouldn't admit to their partner. And they do it without realizing it.
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Second-generation impostor syndromeYou review the document before sending it. It's impeccable. Clear structure, solid argument, precise tone. And then the question you don't dare say out loud appears: how much of this is mine and how much is the AI's?
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You can influence what AI says about youAI has become the inevitable intermediary between your brand and the world. A stranger behind your counter who serves your customers before you've opened your mouth. Can you influence what it says about you?
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AI, the new intermediary between brands and the worldThe Cluetrain Manifesto asked brands to cut out intermediaries and speak directly with people. Just when they had managed it, AI slipped in between them as the most powerful intermediary in history.
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The AI effect and artificial reasoningDoes AI reason, or does it only simulate reasoning? For many, if it doesn't understand what it's doing, its results can't be trusted. What if that conclusion were far shakier than it looks?
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AI and young people: cognitive foreclosureThe problem with young people using AI to do their schoolwork isn't that they're cheating. The real problem is that they may never learn to think.
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The pace of AI and the fear of falling behindYou're running on a treadmill that keeps accelerating without warning. You can't stop, you can't get off. And it keeps speeding up. What you feel isn't so different from the greatest professional fear of this era.
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AI resistance: the carrot and the stickThe other day I watched a worker operating a mini excavator at breathtaking speed and with spectacular precision. I wondered: would he know how to do that work by hand? Probably not. But does it really matter?
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Deliberate imperfection and the effort heuristicThe advice is already circulating in professional forums: add typos to your text so it doesn't look AI-generated. What does it say about us that imperfection has become a certificate of authenticity?
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Human in the loop: hybrid intelligenceAI detects breast cancer with 94.6% accuracy. Impressive. But not enough. What if the decisive leap depended not on more technology, but on more human judgment?
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AI and young professionals: the elevator without stairsAI isn't stealing young professionals' future. It's taking away their past. What if that were, paradoxically, their greatest advantage?
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VAR, bias, and the consensus that doesn't existVAR promised to eliminate human error from soccer. But today half the crowd is still shouting 'penalty' while the rest are convinced he dived. Can technology solve a problem if humans can't agree on what the solution looks like?
Related theses: 24
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AI hallucinations and algorithm aversionWhen Alcaraz loses a final, we say he had a bad day. When AI hallucinates, we say the technology doesn't work.
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The productivity paradox and the J-curveWhile we invest record amounts in AI, productivity statistics remain flat. Where did the return get buried?
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The authenticity economyAs AI advances toward the perfect copy at zero cost, value shifts toward the authentic. Welcome to the authenticity economy.
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AI, politics, and algorithmic persuasionWhen you ask AI about politics, do you really know who's answering?
Related theses: 27, 20, 24, 23
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Trust and AI: authenticity as a deliberate choiceTrust — the cornerstone of any meaningful relationship — is shaking in the era of generative AI. When anything can be created algorithmically in seconds, how do we tell the authentic from the fabricated?
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Wikipedia and digital polarizationThe last bastion of neutrality on the web?
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AI and indigenous languagesToday's AI is the most detailed and accessible memory of what it means to be human ever built. But it is not a perfect memory: it does not remember equally the details of cultures and languages that have been pushed to the margins of the digital world.
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Simplicity as a superpower in the age of AIThe superpower that will make you desirable in AI's eyes is simplicity.
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