Self-help books all copy one central tenet off each other: know what you are grateful for. Have you ever stopped to think how lucky you are that you can talk to knowledgeable, funny and wise friends, be seen and heard by them and run through life with the comfortable pride of a pack of wolves? That's a precious thing that requires work on yourself and a little bit of luck and one of the genuine joys of life. But the dominant experience in most of my life has been that people are great while they generally don't share my interests. I even panicked as a young student of the humanities: the fragmentation of culture, we don't talk about the same things anymore because we are free to think whatever. It turns out we still do but the observation holds: the more you care, the less you share. You become this high pressured, super-caffeinated babbling machine of passion for printed pages, the parakeet of pontification. At some point you sober up and can have normal conversations. People even like you for being a little bit deeper than what's common but warm and understanding. This doesn't change the fact that the value of conversation for information retrieval tends to 0 as you grow older. The probability to hear something genuinely new and get it explained is low, let alone the chance to follow-up and delve deeper. I measure my daily work among other things by the number of questions I ask and answer. It's a proxy of mental activity. It turns out that recently I can ask a machine these questions as I would any human being, and the answers are better. To be clear, I don't plan to fall in love with my chat bot anytime soon, but I do appreciate to explore subjects quickly in the most natural way possible. There is the problem of a threshold of minimal effort you have to overcome to learn. That threshold depends on your age, passion, past success or frustration, social support etc. And I think you have to put in effort to be continuously stepping over it. Otherwise you tell yourself: "Oh that's interesting", which is smart-ass speech for "why bother". You will never look it up. Now LLM's come along and are so easily integrated in the tech stack - phone, PC, text-image-audio - that it's actually more comfortable to chat with them than use any other type of indexing software. And the minimum required effort to learn goes way down. You might say: "But this is not learning, it's pretending". I have spend the greater part of my life learning but actually didn't. Doing what? Reading books, taking notes, re-reading. I was learning alright, but not constructing life contexts in which the knowledge become applicable. It doesn't depend on the medium you use. If the LLM is not systematic enough I can buy a textbook, but it often is. I still get to spend more time looking stuff up and connect it with other knowledge. What I do with it is not the software's problem. One example of this is the recent encyclical about "Magnifica Humanitas". It caused quite a bit of buzz in the tech sphere, which I found surprising until I realized, that we are not living in the 9-5, 2 kids and a perfect lawn kind of boring reality anymore, we could just as well be writing the year 2077. Read Gibson recently? Lem? The Strugatzkis? They read like the Financial Times. The richest man on earth is selling the dream of colonizing Mars and all I hear is - while writing this essay no less - is a synthwave playlist called "1986 FRAGMENED REALITY" and he is selling it for a trillion dollars (2026). Way back when tulips were more expensive than a house at least the product was relatable. I wonder if, after space and quantum, we'll get to invest in the neural storage provider selling me assisted eternal life. As a society, we are living the technological dreams of 50 years ago (or 100[^Foster]). The Gernsback Continuum has shifted into a Gibson Continuum. But you have to admit, there is something hair-raising about life recently. A couple of years ago we were all fearing a global virus. The economy changed, markets shouted: Hokusai!, plunging onto what turned out to be a trampoline of a 10x explosion of semiconductors because we're dreaming up the first artificial mind. One of my favorite universes, Deus Ex, had this touching juxtaposition of old world nostalgia - the Ikarus myth and choral music - and relatable future grime. Humans would be augmented and lose humanity in the pursuit of capital. Religion and conspiracy's were running wild. Now the real Vatican has chimed in to declare the *Magnificence of Humanity*, arguing with biblical authority that we have an epochal choice between the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of the City of God. Just smack your lips and taste the rumble of these words. Human dignity has to be protected and separated from a place in the financial value chain. AI in weapons has to be banned and the fruits of automation need to be shared. What is even more impressive is the reference to another 135 year old encyclical "De Rerum Novarum". It called the misery of the industrial revolution, reconciled private property with the right for just wage and thus dignity of workers. The church is on a tear, religion is mingling once again and shepherding the losers of the current reality - which might just be the majority of people. Elon goes to Mars and wars are fought with battle drones. As a writer I'm in a tough spot. I don't know where reality ends and sci-fi starts. 10 years ago I wrote about an AGI controlling human affairs for the better, now that seems like tomorrow's headline running on CNN. I still have to figure that out. But I am sure of one thing: the loss of humanity, or human dignity in general, is the result of a choice. I don't feel dehumanized or displaced by Claude. It is a welcome addition to my tools by which I enact myself in the world. I will know more and probably be more productive because of it, because it takes away a lot of the drudgery that our rapid technological build-out has piled on top of us. It also makes, probably illegally, all human knowledge accessible even more than earlier tools, because it can now tailor the form in which it is presented to every individual's needs. Especially children, tutored along their own interests by a teacher without a power fantasy. This can be messed up in many ways but what is so exciting about the digital, is that nothing can be reliably dominated by one actor. It is no secret how to make a frontier model. The datasets can be replicated, the hardware will become common place. Last week I asked Claude about heat diffusion in a soft-boiled egg. I built myself a dashboard on my own server. Another time I played a game about gambling. I re-learned my statistics-for-dummies knowledge in a custom spreadsheet, running a monte-carlo simulation on outcomes. I learned that the stock of a company I was interested in is pricing in 3 times the growth of Apple in it's best years. I refined a metaphor about topology with a clarification of the mathematical notion of closeness and summarize papers I read by rambling into my phone while flying to Copenhagen to meet with a friend. Magnificent things are happening around us. It might be in an autonomous car or in a rescue helicopter over a forest fire, but we're certainly in for a ride. ## Footnotes [^Foster]: [Short Story](https://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html)