A couple of weeks ago, I read The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age, by David Brooks.
I loved it, celebrated it as the best piece I read that week, and since then I have kept thinking about various ideas that built up on it, and that I want to share today1.
First of all, let’s start with the title: what does thrive mean?
Each of us has (or should find) their own version of success, but a broad one that I particularly like is: becoming better versions of ourselves. I like it because a lot of the good things in life are downstream from growing as a person. You become better, and better things eventually come to you. That’s true in work, relationships, health, and pretty much anywhere.
Of course, that’s not the only way good things can come to you. Many come by chance, or luck if you may, but if you want to find an angle that is actually under your control, you can hardly go wrong by trying to upgrade yourself over and over.
And here is the problem with AI: I don’t feel that as a tool, by default, it helps with that. Pretty much the opposite. If you blindly use AI to the best of its capabilities, chances are you gradually get worse at several things.
So, when I think about my usage of AI, that’s the angle I try to use. How can I make it so that 1) AI helps me at producing more and better work, while 2) making me better as a professional (and a human being)?
We’ll be exploring this today:
⚖️ What AI takes from us — for everything tech gives, something else you now have to nurture.
🏃♂️ Mental marathoners — when intelligence is cheap, stretching yourself becomes your edge.
🧱 What makes us marathoners — instead of riding as passengers.
🧭 How do you know you are on the right track — better work, learning, taste, energy.
Let’s dive in!
⚖️ What AI takes from us
The fact that AI makes us worse at some things may seem counterintuitive, especially coming from a work tool, but it’s not really surprising if we look at the broader trajectory of technology.
In fact, progress is not strictly linear and incremental. For everything that tech has given us, there are also things we now need to intentionally safeguard and nurture, more than we used to in the past, in order not to lose them:
An obvious one is physical health — regular, commercial gyms were not a thing until the 70s, when our lives gradually became more sedentary and all of a sudden fitness became something you had to be intentional about.
Another one is attention span and our ability to focus — today, we kinda all agree they are under attack, but we hardly ever thought about them before the social media era.
So what is AI going to take from us?
This is a tough question, because AI is likely the broadest tech improvement we have seen in our lifetimes. By simplifying it a bit, it delivers two main things: intelligence and knowledge.
Knowledge is, obviously, about knowing things, while intelligence in this context is the ability to reason on a problem and apply logic to come up with a solution. Most work (and life) tasks require some combination of knowledge and intelligence to be done.
Now, we may nitpick about the definition of AGI, but, as of today already, we have to admit AI does a better job than people for probably >90% of such tasks. That’s the reality, folks. And that’s because, even in those rare cases where an expert still has an edge (better knowledge), or you can reason through a problem better than a frontier model (better intelligence), AI still most often wins because of how cheaper and faster it does the thing. Even when the work done by AI is just, say, 80% as good as a human expert, it may still win because it’s 80% faster and cheaper, and that’s a desirable tradeoff.
Should we be excited about this, because of the opportunities it brings, or scared, because we feel increasingly disposable? It depends.
Personally, I believe this is fine as long as we use AI in a way that puts us, as individuals, on a trajectory of personal growth, instead of regression.
Is this even possible? I believe so. Chess and Go are great examples of this: AI surpassed humans long ago, but it also allowed humans to get immensely better by watching AI play, and now both games are more popular than ever.
But what does it take to get there? Let’s talk about volition and... marathons 👇
🏃♂️ Mental marathoners
In his article, David says that when intelligence is plentiful, volition becomes valuable. In this case, it’s volition to stretch your own abilities and become a better version of yourself. David calls the people who are willing to go through this: mental marathoners.
I like the marathon picture for this, because marathons do not fit a practical purpose, outside that of stretching what you can achieve as a human. When it comes to health, you can (and it’s probably easier to) get in great shape without extreme 40km runs, and of course, when it comes to pure utility, a car covers that distance just fine.
So, just like marathoners run because they feel the need to run and challenge themselves, mental marathoners are supposedly those who feel a need for cognition, and are going to use AI to get better and sharper, as opposed to being passive passengers of this tech.
Now, where David and I disagree is in framing such a need as an innate trait — you either have this hunger or you don’t. I don’t think this is the case, and in general I don’t find this to be a productive way of looking at things. The productive way, instead, is by asking: what can we do to become hungrier for cognition? Or why don’t we feel like it right now?
In other words, assuming we are not either born hungry or not, what can we do to become hungrier? This is an interesting question because it is relevant at all levels: