What’s Left for Us to Do?
Students fake the effort they’re paying to skip, Jensen Huang says learn plumbing, and the AI hype machine bills by the token while no one mentions skills are already eroding.
Dear Friend,
A few months ago I finally did the math on a number I’d been avoiding. Eighty years, twelve months each – 960 months in total. That’s the whole allotment, if you’re lucky. I’m in my fifties, so I’m not looking at 960. I’m looking at closer to 360 – fewer months than there are photos on my phone from one good vacation.
So I wrote a small book about it. 960 makes one argument: we count our lives in the wrong unit. Thousands of weeks are too big to feel. The week is too slippery – there’s always a “next week.” The month is human-sized, textured, and finite enough to sting. Then the book hands you one dumb-simple method to live against that number.
It’s short – you’ll finish it before your coffee gets cold. Read it online here (there is also a free PDF and ePub) or get the print edition from Amazon.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
Maybe The Diploma Was Always the Point?! The newest student AI cheating tools don’t just write the essay for you – they slow-type it into Google Docs, typos and corrections and all, to slip past the detectors, while the human does nothing of the sort. We’ve now built software whose entire job is to fake the effort of learning, because effort is the thing we grade.
To me, this is the whole story; not the cheating per se. Cheating in school is as old as school itself (heck, I am guilty as charged here). The truly interesting question is why a student who’s just signed up for years of student loan debt would so cheerfully skip the part they’re actually paying for. The answer might be that they’re not being lazy (or dumb), they’re being rational. Bryan Caplan made the case years ago in The Case Against Education: most of what a degree buys you isn’t the knowledge, it’s the signal. If the credential is the product and the learning is optional, then handing the work to a bot that types its own typos is exactly what a smart customer does. Yes, this is the calculator panic all over again – except the calculator never pretended to be you doing the arithmetic. This one does. Which leaves one uncomfortable question for every school grading the take-home essay: what did we think we were measuring all along?
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The Perils of Remote Work. Much (much!) has been written about the pros and cons of remote work. Companies left and right have been requiring people to come back to the office – or embrace the remote/hybrid model. Studies have been done to show that people are happier when they can work from home; others show that remote work has a measurable impact on creativity and innovation across the firm. But, until now, little has been written (let alone studied) about the impact of remote work on mental health. A recently published study in Science looked at a large swath of data from studies done on remote work (note that this is US-only data) and came to a sobering conclusion (emphasis mine):
After the pandemic, workers in remote-capable jobs spent more time working alone and avoided social activities with their friends, remaining more isolated both during and after work. This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely.
It’s not a pretty picture and warrants further study, as well as consideration on behalf of employers (outside of the ROI debate).
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Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment. I do disagree with the multi-level marketing analogy (as MLMs live and die by their pyramid scheme nature of recruiting new people into the system), but Matthew Hughes does have a point when it comes to the notion that the “vibe-code yourself to millions” message of too many of the GenAI startups is predatory, sad, and dangerous. It makes me wonder how we will remember this moment in time.
And I am concerned that the fear I’ve described is being exploited by companies like Replit and Cursor (which is also doing the exact same influencer marketing schtick, albeit not as aggressively as Replit), who are touting their services as a way for people to escape the precariousness of this current moment.
Hughes’s best point is that vibe-coding is worse than Herbalife because at least Herbalife tells you the price, whereas vibe-coding tools notoriously burn through tokens with little price transparency. Which is also why it isn’t Herbalife.
P.S. Read this together with this post from growth marketer Elena Verna on “The Mom-and-Pop SaaS era has arrived” – as much as I agree with vibe coding being a great way to build little one-off tools, it’s a disaster in the making when you think about “mom-and-pops” creating SaaS companies…
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We All Should Be Plumbers. When Jeffrey and I were at Singularity University, we used to comment on the fact that the average plumber in Silicon Valley made about as much (and sometimes more) money than the average software engineer. The same was (and is) true for many other trades. Plus – try to get a plumber to come to your house if you live in the Bay Area and you’ll experience first hand how hard it is to even find one. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang just made the same point:
“If you’re an electrician, you’re a plumber, a carpenter – we’re going to need hundreds of thousands of them to build all of these factories,” Huang told Channel 4 News in the U.K. in late 2025. “The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to see a boom. You’ve going to have to be doubling and doubling and doubling every single year.”
Aside from him potentially being right – it’s kinda sad to think we live in a world where the value of human labor is to keep the machines running. Brave New World indeed.
What We Are Reading
AI Is Taking Over Hospitals Medicine is usually last to adopt new technology, so why is AI being rolled out in hospitals faster than anyone can evaluate it? @Jane
AI Models Capable of Devastating Attacks on Governments and Business Months Away, Rare 5 Eyes Statement Warns The Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance set up between five countries after WWII, warns that, “Cyber risk can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue. This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility.” @Mafe
China Is Winning the Other Tech Race The global AI race may grab the headlines, but for folks wanting to anticipate the future, China’s commanding lead in electric technology (and the geopolitical and economic implications it could have) should be receiving similar attention. @Jeffrey
The End of Cheap Capital A good reminder that in a tougher environment, strategy is often less about what you choose to do and more about what you’re willing to say no to. @Kacee
I Fed the People Building the Metaverse A hilarious and quite sobering read from someone truly on the inside of Meta’s VR and AI fever dream. What could go wrong when the tech bros make their own kombucha? @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🎧 Constantly wearing your headphones has a surprising amount of implications – from increased isolation and loneliness, to a significant drop in spoken words, to the “content effect” where podcasters feel warmer and more relatable when listened to through headphones, and hence more persuasive: the AirPods Effect.
🏥 First we had shoe company Allbirds become an AI company, now we have AI image generator Midjourney becoming a healthcare company. And of course, it’s largely BS.
🤌 Another rock in the “size is all you need” shoe of AI model scaling: Bigger models are not the way.
🥼 It will be a while until we truly know for sure, but the early signs indicate that the regular use of AI can lead to a decline in skill use and building: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they’re not good.
🤖 Delivery robots, once hailed as the future of logistics, are getting on people’s nerves. Funny enough – in the very first Briefing (long before it was a Substack), I made this very point while observing how densely populated the sidewalks in my then-home London were: “We had to get out of the way”: The backlash over delivery robots.
🤳 Headline says it all (and the photos of the workers wearing GoPros are seriously disturbing): ‘Who is going to pay us when we’re replaced by robots?’ The Indian factory workers told to film themselves for AI
💻 The PC is dead: India and China are home to 2.9 billion people – and together they bought just 13 million PCs in Q1.
👁️🗨️ It certainly doesn’t come as a surprise, but it does warrant the question about disclosure: Brands using AI-generated influencers to promote products on social media.
🏠 AI slop is coming for your home listing: AI is cursing renters with the promise of impossible homes.
🕴️ Remember googling yourself? Now, of course, we check what ChatGPT thinks of us. Here is a nifty tool that lets you check your name (or anyone else’s) and its representation in major LLMs.
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Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.
Allbirds becoming an AI company reminds me of K-tel becoming an Internet company a quarter-century ago.