In this post, I contend that idiosyncratic intelligent action can lone be sustained in an intelligent community of another humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in rotate makes personal intelligent action rarer.
Some years ago, whenever it became apparent that AI would resolve application engineering, my thinking was:
- In my expert life, I’m blessed to move one flat up to rotate into a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a fine specialized writer, I can depict what I desire and let AI agents compose the code.
- In my own time, I can keep doing the things I attention concerning since I bask them intrinsically. This is the “intellectual” flank of application engineering: reading specialized blog posts and papers, learning new programming languages, designing new programming languages, penning specialized essays, penning code for my small open origin projects.
The second item has not fairly worked out. What really happened? First, the discourse of application engineering became worse. As I wrote earlier:
Claude Code was released a small complete a twelvemonth ago. In that abbreviated time, software engineering has been entirely transformed. Materially, it power be positive: higher productivity, although at the disbursal of a messier codebase. Socially, it has been a disaster.
The conversation about application engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry misplaced 30 IQ points. People used to conversation about compilers, category systems, logic. Now they conversation concerning “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The conversation is narrower, shallower, and additional repetitive. There’s only so many times I can comprehend concerning “agentic harnesses” before I endure my mind.
Then there’s the defeat of individual chief formation: there is nothing to learn. Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower accomplishment than software engineering. The instrumental size of the activity has improved in that group can get additional output per component of effort, but the size of work that’s concerning construction up individual chief has collapsed. And perchance this is rational. Why study to code at all? The computers can do that for us. And so the rigorous, systematic thinking you need to custom in command to be a good programmer: all gone. The machines can be logical for us. We can fair vibe.
Second, contributing to the commons of application engineering is increasingly pointless. Before AI, you could publish open-source code, compose blog posts to share ideas or motivate another people, compose expository texts akin tutorials, forum posts, textbooks etc. to instruct people. After AI, what’s the point?
- You compose a blog post: who’s going to peruse it? The next training run will ingest it, marginally improving AI capabilities. Maybe the article was a workaround to several obscure specialized problem, so the next period someone encounters that problem, they volition ask Claude, who volition resolve it without crediting you. Maybe you had several understanding concerning how to construction large codebases: who cares? The humans aren’t making those decisions anymore.
- You scheme a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t compose or equal peruse the code anymore. The programming tongue is an implementation item the humans no longer have to attention about.
- You compose a library, and publish it on GitHub: who cares? The AIs might discover it, and use it, but the controller won’t cognize you be or did anything.
It’s not fair “you can’t get GitHub stars or traffic to your blog”; rather, there is no awareness of a average individual project you can contribute to. There’s your own personal storyline of code, which you can develop infinitely in all directions with the assistance of AI, but you never have to depart the storyline and go to the market to trade alongside people. Under these conditions, it’s difficult to attention or do anything.
But does it really matter? Does it matter if we halt penning blog posts about obscure JavaScript features, and designing new programming languages? Maybe writing code was continually drudgery, and now we can move on to higher things, like math—oh, wait.
From observing what happened to application engineering, and what’s currently happening to mathematics, I think we can get several broad insights about intellectual practices in general.
We lean to think of intelligent action as personal and solitary: the philosopher sitting in his armchair, deriving the earth ab initio. But intellectual action has two inputs that can’t be acquired in isolation: a shared build of work to build upon, and motivation. The shared build of work is communal, unless you desire to recapitulate the complete tech tree. Motivation we can interrupt downward into two components:
- Intrinsic motivation: we study for the purpose of learning, we create art from a compulsion we can’t understand, etc.
- Extrinsic motivation: David Chapman defines “nobility” as manifesting glory for the assistance of others, and using our abilities in service of others. We desire our activity to be helpful to others, we desire others to benefit from our work, we desire to contribute to a shared individual project. Fame and the esteem and fine volition of your peers are the proxies by which we measure our contribution.
We lean to think of intrinsic motivation as the purest kind: endogenous, self-created, unmotivated by matter or social gain. But it’s an emotion, and, like all emotions, it’s transient and short-lived. And this is rational: otherwise, we’d all be stuck in life-long unproductive obsessions. So, we need something to inhabit the gaps between moments of divine inspiration. Extrinsic motivation serves this function.
Private intelligent action that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intelligent community to provision matter and motivation, akin fuel and oxidizer. That personal activity, in turn, sustains the community: by publishing papers, textbooks, code, etc., you add to the shared build of activity for others to build on top of; by citing someone’s document or contributing to their repository, you provision them the acknowledgment and regard that confirms they are doing useful work, which in rotate motivates them to keep contributing.
Without community, you don’t get secluded individuals all operating on their own things: you get nothing. The inputs to intelligent action dry up: no one is adding to the shared build of work, and there are no peers to advantage from your own intelligent activity. Without this extrinsic motivation, you get less intellectual action because, again, intrinsic motivation is fleeting.
After AI, intelligent contributions rotate into unnecessary or redundant. In the case of software: the AIs compose all the code, so what’s the item of writing either code or prose? The spectators for those things is now severely diminished. Humans don’t compose code anymore, so they won’t peruse blog posts about how to compose code, or tutorials, or try new libraries or programming languages. In the case of mathematics: the AIs can demonstrate theorems, compose papers, explain papers, tutor students, and in the near future, they power compose entire textbooks improved than humans. So what’s the item of penning a paper, or a textbook? It’s superfluous.
If intelligent action is unnecessary—if there’s no consequence to designing a new programming tongue or publishing a paper, or if there’s simply no community to contribute to—then it won’t happen. There’s no point.
Now use this to all another domain of intelligent activity, and you see what the forthcoming looks like. There may be individuals construction new libraries and programming languages, but no shared civilization of application engineering; there may be idiosyncratic students and practitioners of mathematics, but no living community of mathematicians.
I’ve spoken to group who think AI volition have a affirmative consequence on the existence of the mind, and their thinking is that correct now too many group are doing intellectual action for instrumental reasons: citations, clout, etc. In this view, the downfall of intelligent communities is good, since it sifts the intrinsically-motivated übermenschen from the clout-chasing masses.
I think this perspective fits alongside contemporary society: we perspective intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as elevated and low status, respectively. A “developed” person is expected to have a private, inexhaustible reserve of motivation which is causally detached from external reward.
But this is not a realistic perspective of individual beings. Humans are social animals who can lone flourish in the community of another humans. We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if innovation makes our contributions superfluous, afterward what is left?
Thanks to Luke Drago and Andy Matuschak for feedback and conversations.
