KyberNuII

I urge young people nowadays to solely select things that push their thinking abilities further. Both writing and technical work (maths, coding) involved a large part of the human brain being engaged in thinking. The economy was run on the final output - so there was little to no incentive to think about sharpening the cognition itself. Now, the barrier to producing the final output in both forms is collapsing. What seemed technically or structurally hard in writing a thesis or a codebase is more or less automated. Yet, we are still to see a proliferation of paradigm-changing software or ideas, whether in engineering or physics at large! We have great newsworthy headlines of century-old conjectures being solved with counterexamples, yet most of these problems are cleanly posed by humans. Posing the problem is assumed to be trivial, however it is in itself a test of intelligence to ask the right and hard questions. It is so easy to diminish the importance of these so-called verifiable domains because outputs are now being produced effortlessly - akin to conveyor belts mechanizing and ramping up production in the last century. Yet the human, (general part) of cognition that has moved the needle on discoveries, put man on the moon, and decided what problems were worth solving in the first place - is largely absent from where we are headed at scale*. I see the tensions rising everywhere around me as people struggle to pick a lane and create meaningful careers for themselves- what really will remain human after the dust settles? I see second-hand opinions handed down by executives and corporate hierarchies matter less and less. The truth is, no one really knows the answer to what will not be automated. So, you must learn and relearn how to think for yourself: + Interrogate the limits, floors, and ceilings of an idea. + Understand both the thesis and the anti-thesis of a problem. + Learn to ask what assumptions are doing the real work, and what would make you change your mind. This is a fundamental part of education that is getting lost in all of this hype and noise. Use machines to build systems to extend and push your thinking further. But I urge you to not leave thinking in its entirety to the machines.