What persists in our species when the things that brought it to life seem to be replaced?

You may feel excited, or totally exhausted, at not being able to escape reading, hearing, and absorbing news, concepts, and everything related to AI, or agents...

The most basic and intuitive complaint across humanity at this exact moment is that AI is taking more jobs than any previous industrial revolution ever did. But that is the first thought, and it is the fastest one to come up with as a species, because it sounds and feels like an actual threat, something that activates the neural circuits of our brain to trigger excitatory activity, signaling a demand on our allostatic resources and body budget. This turns it all into something that feels biologically hard to ignore.

Attention Is All You Need was the name of the paper that kickstarted it all, and indirectly contains a powerful metaphor, because it is attention that drives individual lives, purposes, and therefore, in aggregate, entire societies.

For a large portion of humans, just two or three years ago, their attention was fully invested in a clear routine of daily tasks that demanded our fundamental set of skills, something that enabled us to feel useful, rewarded, and grounded, sometimes mindful or stressed, but alive.

We require feedback loops in order to sense that we are making progress, and to give our minds the certainty that we are heading toward something that at least resembles a direction.

But what happens when the feedback loops that used to make us feel alive vanish or mutate into lower resolution, less owned, externalized agency?

What happens when we find ourselves not only delegating scoped execution, but also critical thinking and intelligence? Are we also delegating our identity?

At that point, where do we allocate our psychic energy?

So how do we choose the problems to solve, the products to build, the meaning and purpose to construct in this era?

A few will simply give in to the overwhelm of novelty and end up "replaced" because they are too attached to their priors and foundations, but competitive humans will understand that it is time to migrate, not from essence, but from execution, because the essence is still to solve problems, just new ones that we have to figure out how to discover, prioritize, and allocate. Some of them will emerge naturally, and others will be hidden but very impactful.

Execution -> Intention

Building the core engines and specific mechanics of pieces feels wasteful or counterproductive when you can orchestrate their construction into something that flows with agentic execution. Just setting the intention, conditions, and restrictions is enough. I literally mean an agent running loops.

This allows competitive humans to allocate their psychic energy into things that were not necessarily worthy of attention before. These new things could be treated as

The engineering of making competitive decisions; coming up with more impactful ideas; and reaching a self understanding of reality so that you can orchestrate better. More than any other technical skill.

It looks abstract, for sure. But everything is abstract until a species demands to materialize it in order to survive. The persistent aggregated attention of a species toward something will unlock the clarity to reach stability, as in every other major technological breakthrough in history.

To answer the question: In this era, we choose the problems to solve by understanding and deconstructing the intentions and priors that make humans interact the way they do with systems and with other humans, including ourselves. And then articulating that information into something transformative of life, with the correct set of instructions and conditions. This is how you build the product.

And the outcome of doing this persistently is discovering meaning and purpose.

See? It is no different from what we have always been doing. We just need to frame it according to the contingency so that everyone losing their heads can become rational again.

I hope we remember that outsourcing the execution was never the same as outsourcing the reason we do it.