Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Rich Carr's avatar

Peter, the infrastructure math is staggering and there's no reason to doubt any of it. Trillion-dollar buildouts, fusion timelines collapsing, intelligence becoming a utility. All real.

However, a tsunami doesn't care whether you can swim.

Every capability you've described (agentic systems, autonomous coding, robotic labor) requires a human somewhere in the loop who can evaluate whether the output is good, direct it toward the right problem, and know when the machine is confidently wrong. That's judgment. And judgment doesn't scale with compute. It scales with development.

Your advice to students is "collaborate with AI, treat it as a thinking partner." I agree completely. But collaboration requires bringing something to the table. The person who shows up empty, who never formed a position, never learned to evaluate competing options, never built the cognitive architecture to hold ambiguity, doesn't collaborate with AI. They defer to it. And deference at scale, across millions of workers, is a different kind of tsunami.

The infrastructure is deploying. The capability is arriving. The question nobody's funding at the same pace, "Who's building the human capacity to direct it?" Because intelligence as a utility only works when the person paying for it knows what to ask and can evaluate what comes back.

I love Elon's analogy, your dissection, and the tsunami seems to be hitting our news feed and inbox daily. The swimmers? Well, they still need to be trained...or be moved to higher ground, quickly.

zach's avatar

Whats the point of it all

89 more comments...

No posts

Ready for more?