A pre-obituary for google>copy>paste

First, I’m citing an article by a guy named “Packy”. Can we just let that beautiful oddity sink in for a moment…? Thank you. In Packy McKormick’s article “Intelligence Superabundance” he explores a dominant meme and its offshoot-principles, laws, paradoxes, etc.

From Induced Demand: you build more trains, more people take public transport..

To Parkinson’s Law: budget more time to a project and the project ends up taking almost exactly that long; budget less time, less time need..

To Moore’s Law: microchip compute capacity doubles every two years –  demand increases (note: not actually in Packy’s article, but it fits)..

To Jevons Paradox, when technology innovation improves efficiency, total resource consumption increases anyway..

After setting these ideas before us, Pack McKormick then does something pretty cool: he applies it to AI.

He asks: what if an abundance of intelligence leads to increased demand for intelligence?

If so, then will more intelligence be demanded of our work?

This questions falls in line with Sam Altman’s congressional testimony: Yes, I will take your jobs – but I will create newer jobs in their stead, and better ones.

Now flip that.

If people are supplying and demanding more intelligent work, there’s less room for humdrum bullshit work.

In fact, let’s take it a step further and, as Kipp Bodnar puts it, disrupt yourself now of the bullshit work – the repetitive and brainless work tasks – before the robots disrupt it for you.

The design of business software and services should be predicated on this principle – that the era of manual digital labor (“google it, copy it, paste it”) is over.