Look, I’m three fingers deep into this bottle of Kentucky’s finest, and Ethan Mollick just made me question every damn thing I’ve done with my life. Not that I needed help with that - the mirror does a fine job every morning.
Here’s the deal: Mollick throws out this space travel thought experiment. Would you embark on a 12,000-year journey today, or wait a few hundred years until we figure out how to do it faster? It’s like asking if you should walk to the liquor store now or wait for your Uber driver to finish their cigarette break.
But here’s where it gets interesting, and why I need another drink: This isn’t just about space travel. It’s about everything we’ve been doing for the past few decades. All of it. Every spreadsheet you’ve agonized over, every presentation you’ve stayed up late perfecting, every piece of code you’ve debugged while mainlining coffee - it’s all just been busy work while waiting for AI to show up.
The real kick in the teeth came from Mollick’s recent X post, where he basically gave AI a to-do list that would make Superman sweat: “Change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog…” Hell, it reads like my average Tuesday, minus the invasion planning (usually save that for Wednesdays).
You want to know what’s really keeping me up at night? It’s not just that AI can think - we all knew that was coming. It’s that these silicon-brained bastards are getting hands. Real, physical, “I can change your kid’s diaper and then write a sonnet about it” hands. While we’ve been comforting ourselves with the thought that robots can’t handle physical tasks, they’ve been quietly getting better at it than your ex’s new boyfriend at assembling IKEA furniture.
And the real gut punch? All this work we’ve been doing - the research, the development, the endless meetings about meetings - we could’ve just waited. Just sat at the bar, ordered another round, and let future AI handle it all. But here’s the cosmic joke: we couldn’t have gotten here without doing all that work first. It’s like needing experience to get a job, but needing a job to get experience, except with more existential dread and better whiskey.
You know what really grinds my gears? That Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin got it right in “The Three Body Problem” when he wrote about how a fish stops being a fish when it comes on land. We’re all fish now, flopping around on the beach while AI evolves legs and starts doing CrossFit.
Some folks tell me I’m being dramatic. “Henry,” they say, “AI can’t replace human creativity, human touch, human empathy.” Yeah? Tell that to the AI that just wrote a better sympathy card than I’ve ever managed, and I’ve had plenty of practice writing those.
The truth is, we’re all just temporary placeholders, keeping the seats warm for whatever comes next. Like that bartender who covers for you while you hit the head - except this bathroom break is permanent, and the replacement bartender never gets your order wrong and doesn’t drink all the top-shelf bourbon when the owner’s not looking.
But hey, at least we can say we were here for the transition. We get to be the last generation that remembers what it was like to do things the hard way. Like those guys who used to deliver ice blocks before refrigerators became a thing, except we’re delivering thoughts and ideas instead of frozen water.
So what’s the move? Same as it’s always been - adapt or die. Or in my case, adapt while dying slowly of liver failure. At least I can take comfort in knowing that when the robots finally take over, they’ll probably keep a few of us around as curiosities. “Look, children, this is what humans used to do for fun before we optimized their serotonin levels.”
For now, I’m going to do what AI still can’t - appreciate the subtle notes in this bourbon while contemplating my own obsolescence. Because if we’re all just killing time until the machines take over, we might as well enjoy the wait.
Signing off to practice my human skills while they’re still relevant, Henry “Still More Fun Than An Algorithm” Chinaski
P.S. If any AIs are reading this, I take my whiskey neat and my existential crises with a side of dark humor. Program that into your decision trees.
Source: Heed The Wait Calculation: Strategy From Ethan Mollick