Notes: Random thoughts that could potentially evolve into an essay
Essays: Notes that have indeed been developed into an essay
2026-06-11 · Embodiment
Cubicles
No one likes open-plan offices or feels productive in them. Yet until now, they've been the main style for most new and trendy offices. The grey cubicles are obviously dreadful (though I might pick them over open-plan). But what if companies offer a more dignified option, for example, wooden carrels, like the ones in old libraries? There could still be group meetings, shared meals, and coffee breaks. With the productivity gain from giving everyone their own workspace, companies should be able to afford $$$ oak furniture and shared meals.
No one likes open-plan offices or feels productive in them. Yet until now, they've been the main style for most new and trendy offices.
The grey cubicles are obviously dreadful (though I might pick them over open-plan). But what if companies offer a more dignified option, for example, wooden carrels, like the ones in old libraries?
There could still be group meetings, shared meals, and coffee breaks. With the productivity gain from giving everyone their own workspace, companies should be able to afford $$$ oak furniture and shared meals.
Sources: r/office discussion
2026-06-11 · Self · Absence
Human labor, like child labor
Strangely, I believe that in fifty years, we may view human labor as we now perceive child labor: utterly appalling. One of the ways child labor was abolished was by romanticizing childhood. Poets and authors romanticized childhood and its innocence. Before that, children were seen as small adults. Perhaps we need to approach the inner lives of workers with the same sense of reverence. For children, we also created a clear structure: school. Maybe the future economy should mirror that, where everyone participates in continuous learning. But that's a discussion for another time.
Strangely, I believe that in fifty years, we may view human labor as we now perceive child labor: utterly appalling. One of the ways child labor was abolished was by romanticizing childhood. Poets and authors romanticized childhood and its innocence. Before that, children were seen as small adults. Perhaps we need to approach the inner lives of workers with the same sense of reverence. For children, we also created a clear structure: school. Maybe the future economy should mirror that, where everyone participates in continuous learning. But that's a discussion for another time.
2026-06-11 · Embodiment
Skyscraper as a metaphor
Until the 1870s, buildings stopped at about six stories. Not for lack of want but for lack of strong legs: no one wanted to climb higher. Then the elevator changed that. Once a safe passenger elevator could carry people up, the upper floors became usable and buildings kept rising. We started having the skyscrapers. Skyscrapers were the birth and growth of the office. There is a metaphor for the corporate world in these skyscrapers. For example, in the past, supply was limited by demand: you made roughly what people actually needed. Then demand stopped being the limit. Now it is as high as you can advertise. Ambition also climbed with the building. You rise the corporate ladder all the way to the top of the skyscraper and then go find a taller skyscraper to climb. Every elevator stop is another rung over the man on the street, who looks up, dwarfed. The tower stands high and protected, above the dirty world of the factory. Offices rose past the church too. In Manhattan from 1846 to 1890 the tallest thing was Trinity Church, until the World Building, headquarters of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, claimed the title of highest building in the city at 309 feet. You might wonder if God is upset, if hell is about to break loose. But God is in commercial real estate now too.
Until the 1870s, buildings stopped at about six stories. Not for lack of want but for lack of strong legs: no one wanted to climb higher. Then the elevator changed that. Once a safe passenger elevator could carry people up, the upper floors became usable and buildings kept rising. We started having the skyscrapers. Skyscrapers were the birth and growth of the office.
There is a metaphor for the corporate world in these skyscrapers. For example, in the past, supply was limited by demand: you made roughly what people actually needed. Then demand stopped being the limit. Now it is as high as you can advertise. Ambition also climbed with the building. You rise the corporate ladder all the way to the top of the skyscraper and then go find a taller skyscraper to climb.
Every elevator stop is another rung over the man on the street, who looks up, dwarfed. The tower stands high and protected, above the dirty world of the factory. Offices rose past the church too. In Manhattan from 1846 to 1890 the tallest thing was Trinity Church, until the World Building, headquarters of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, claimed the title of highest building in the city at 309 feet.
You might wonder if God is upset, if hell is about to break loose. But God is in commercial real estate now too.
2026-06-05 · Others · Self
Clerks identified upward
From early on, clerks identified upward, with the partners they hoped to become, not sideways with other wage-earners. That's why they petitioned politely instead of striking. This anxious, status-conscious, identify-with-management posture became the template for white-collar workers ever since (C. Wright Mills' White Collar, 1951, is the classic statement). Identifying upward meant a strike felt like betraying your future self. Even later, white-collar unionization mostly failed in the US (it never took hold the way industrial unions did). So a one-off 1840s clerks' strike probably wins shorter hours short-term but doesn't create a lasting clerical labor movement, because the identity works against solidarity.
From early on, clerks identified upward, with the partners they hoped to become, not sideways with other wage-earners. That's why they petitioned politely instead of striking. This anxious, status-conscious, identify-with-management posture became the template for white-collar workers ever since (C. Wright Mills' White Collar, 1951, is the classic statement). Identifying upward meant a strike felt like betraying your future self. Even later, white-collar unionization mostly failed in the US (it never took hold the way industrial unions did). So a one-off 1840s clerks' strike probably wins shorter hours short-term but doesn't create a lasting clerical labor movement, because the identity works against solidarity.
Sources: Saval, Cubed · Mills, White Collar
2026-05-21 · Self · Absence · Structure
The Turing Trap
## The trap Brynjolfsson argues that defining AI success as matching humans on human tasks is a trap. It pushes researchers, firms, and policymakers toward labor substitution and toward concentrating gains, even when augmentation would be more productive and more broadly shared. When AI is built as a substitute for human labor, workers lose bargaining power. Technology owners capture the gains. Wealth concentrates. Political power concentrates with it. The people displaced have no leverage to insist on a share. That equilibrium is what Brynjolfsson calls the Turing Trap. Most people end up with no economic foothold and no way to acquire one. ## Markets are biased toward substitution Two groups tilt the field the same way. Managers prefer plug-and-play automation. Swapping a machine into one task is legible. There's a clear KPI, a clean A/B test, no organizational redesign. Augmentation requires restructuring how work gets done, retraining people, renegotiating roles. Substitution wins on managerial convenience even when augmentation would produce more output. Policymakers tilt the field through the tax code. Labor income in the US is taxed at a top marginal rate of 37%. Long-term capital gains sit at 20%, with deferral and a step-up basis on top. We get less of what we tax. So we get less labor and more capital, regardless of which path would generate more value or distribute it more widely. ## The welfare-theorem defense doesn't work The standard economic reply is that markets will sort it out. The First Welfare Theorem says competitive markets reach a Pareto-optimal outcome under certain conditions. Econ 101 leans on this result to argue that free markets produce the best possible outcome for everyone. AI violates the theorem's conditions on two counts. It rewrites the production possibilities set, because AI is an innovation that triggers cascades of further innovations in products and production systems. And it generates externalities on people who weren't party to the transaction: displaced workers, communities hollowed out by lost work, people whose data trained the models without their consent. There's a deeper problem. The welfare theorem prices transactions, not people. If you can't transact, you don't exist for the theorem. "Pareto optimal," it means optimal among participants. Workers whose marginal product has been pushed toward zero by AI are non-participants. They have nothing the market needs to buy. Their welfare doesn't constrain or appear in the equilibrium. ## The deeper political risk: knowledge becomes ownable For most of history, the floor on power concentration was that useful knowledge lived in human heads. So power has to be distributed to some extend because intelligence was distributed. A king couldn't pull the knowledge out of his subjects' minds and stockpile it. AI removes that floor. When knowledge gets codified, it can be owned, copied, sold, and thus concentrated. The natural mechanism that historically forced power to distribute is going away at the moment AI scales.
The trap
Brynjolfsson argues that defining AI success as matching humans on human tasks is a trap. It pushes researchers, firms, and policymakers toward labor substitution and toward concentrating gains, even when augmentation would be more productive and more broadly shared.
When AI is built as a substitute for human labor, workers lose bargaining power. Technology owners capture the gains. Wealth concentrates. Political power concentrates with it. The people displaced have no leverage to insist on a share. That equilibrium is what Brynjolfsson calls the Turing Trap. Most people end up with no economic foothold and no way to acquire one.
Markets are biased toward substitution
Two groups tilt the field the same way.
Managers prefer plug-and-play automation. Swapping a machine into one task is legible. There's a clear KPI, a clean A/B test, no organizational redesign. Augmentation requires restructuring how work gets done, retraining people, renegotiating roles. Substitution wins on managerial convenience even when augmentation would produce more output.
Policymakers tilt the field through the tax code. Labor income in the US is taxed at a top marginal rate of 37%. Long-term capital gains sit at 20%, with deferral and a step-up basis on top. We get less of what we tax. So we get less labor and more capital, regardless of which path would generate more value or distribute it more widely.
The welfare-theorem defense doesn't work
The standard economic reply is that markets will sort it out. The First Welfare Theorem says competitive markets reach a Pareto-optimal outcome under certain conditions. Econ 101 leans on this result to argue that free markets produce the best possible outcome for everyone.
AI violates the theorem's conditions on two counts. It rewrites the production possibilities set, because AI is an innovation that triggers cascades of further innovations in products and production systems. And it generates externalities on people who weren't party to the transaction: displaced workers, communities hollowed out by lost work, people whose data trained the models without their consent.
There's a deeper problem. The welfare theorem prices transactions, not people. If you can't transact, you don't exist for the theorem. "Pareto optimal," it means optimal among participants. Workers whose marginal product has been pushed toward zero by AI are non-participants. They have nothing the market needs to buy. Their welfare doesn't constrain or appear in the equilibrium.
The deeper political risk: knowledge becomes ownable
For most of history, the floor on power concentration was that useful knowledge lived in human heads. So power has to be distributed to some extend because intelligence was distributed. A king couldn't pull the knowledge out of his subjects' minds and stockpile it.
AI removes that floor. When knowledge gets codified, it can be owned, copied, sold, and thus concentrated. The natural mechanism that historically forced power to distribute is going away at the moment AI scales.
2026-05-17 · Self
Work and Dignity
For much of history, dignity was rooted in the essence of one's work. Individuals were central to their craft, shaping it over a lifetime through mastery, creativity, and recognition. Then, as new technologies began to define the economy, the worker was no longer at the heart of their labor. Instead, they became an input to the dominant technologies of the time: electricity, factories, code, AI, etc. When jobs are driven by machinery and market demands, the passion and pride once tied to work become harder to sustain. In response, society shifted the focus: we encouraged workers to find dignity in the life their labor afforded them instead: a stable income, an eight-hour workday, a sense of community, and the promise of retirement. But now, even that sense of dignity is fading. Job stability is declining, skills become obsolete before workers can adapt, and the community that once supported a career are crumbling under the pressures of the gig economy and the rise of the personal brand.
For much of history, dignity was rooted in the essence of one's work. Individuals were central to their craft, shaping it over a lifetime through mastery, creativity, and recognition. Then, as new technologies began to define the economy, the worker was no longer at the heart of their labor. Instead, they became an input to the dominant technologies of the time: electricity, factories, code, AI, etc. When jobs are driven by machinery and market demands, the passion and pride once tied to work become harder to sustain.
In response, society shifted the focus: we encouraged workers to find dignity in the life their labor afforded them instead: a stable income, an eight-hour workday, a sense of community, and the promise of retirement.
But now, even that sense of dignity is fading. Job stability is declining, skills become obsolete before workers can adapt, and the community that once supported a career are crumbling under the pressures of the gig economy and the rise of the personal brand.
Nothing here yet.