Chris Nelder

I guess we'll find out soon enough, but I find it hard to make the case for *any* kind of knowledge work being immune to AI competition. It's going to be a question of degree.

Try it out. Take a difficult task that you do and put it to the current ChatGPT engine, and see how it performs.

Thanks Brendan. No doubt they will still need training and experience. I think they'll need tools and strategies that are built for the new information landscape -- maybe some that don't even exist yet. Critical thinking and reading skills will be more important than ever.

Very kind Peter, thank you. Actually I have arrived at precisely that same conclusion as well. It's the only strategy that makes sense to me now.

If you've been struggling with climate despair/doom, definitely check out this excellent thread by @hayleygullen.com (and I'm not just saying that because of her kind shout-out to @transitionshow.bsky.social at the end).

Thanks for the very kind shout-out to @transitionshow.bsky.social, Hayley! I loved that thread. I've never been called "quietly passionate" before but I'll take it!

I worked with a copyeditor once who could spot the difference between an italic and regular font *space* on the page. Talk about a lost art... Anyway they'll get my Chicago when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Amen to that. It was a decent gig for a long time.

Or just telling their AI to watch it and then tell them what they didn't watch.

I should note that the result wasn't without errors. But it took a tiny fraction of the time to review & correct it that it would to produce it. And I *instantly* became lazy about it. Never again am I going to write another lousy reference, etc. Instant and permanent change in my workflow. 4/3

Exactly and the baseline demand isn't even paying attention anyway. Half the time, it doesn't even know or care if it's consuming the real thing or a slop replica. An extremely indiscriminating customer.

Now I can literally just give it a handful of unformatted links, APA style citations, mixed up formats, etc., and it goes and sorts it all out and gives me my bibliography to my style spec. Saved me *hours* on the first go. And now I can use it whenever, just say "put these in house style." 3/3

Then I gave it more prompts to specify additional rules (Initial Caps on authors, go find their first name if the citation only has first initial, makes sure all the links work, DOI citation at the end hyperlinked to itself, etc. Probably took an hour to fine tune it. 2/x

I did a decade of it myself. No question. I'll tell you what, specifically, prompted this thread: I showed ChatGPT a list of references from my show notes, which are formatted unconventionally in my own style, and told it to learn that and we're going to call it "house style." It did. Instantly. 1/x

If I had to bet on the vast majority of the economy choosing between cheap quantity and expensive quality, you know what I'm going to bet on. And it's all going to get irretrievably lost in the noise anyway. But those few who get to remain valued human knowledge workers should do alright. 8/8

And to resist it will mean trying to sell a premium product amid a super cheap sea of slop, to people with no attention spans who let AIs make their decisions for them anyway, and it's hard to even validate anyway because the reference material is all slop now too. Good luck with ALL of that. 7/x

Everything else is going to be slopified, inside and out, shot right through with it, and it's going to be unstoppable. We have no cognitive or social reflexes to guard us against it (in fact it fully hijacks our OS) and no legal or tradition for resisting it. (Maybe the Luddites, kinda.) 6/x

So the useful work of your investment of human energy as a content producer just got wildly inefficient as compared to an AI competitor, and the market for those golden drops of original sentient wisdom will be sold like Faberge eggs, only for the most discriminating audiences of ample means. 5/x

So--going back to the electricity metaphor--the exergy of the content system looks bleak. The actual useful work is a tiny fraction of the human energy embodied in the knowledge processed, which itself is a tiny fraction of the human primary energy input. Conversion losses all the way through. 4/

Meanwhile, the truly quality material, creatively generated and lovingly curated and presented by a human, is about to get completely lost in the corpus, mere golden drops into an ocean of slop, and increasingly hard to find (or even distinguish). 3/

And if you think about content like you think about electricity--generation & consumption--much of the apparent demand doesn't even know (or maybe care) how accurate the result is. They'd happily and knowingly buy slop to tick a box if it was super cheap over paying a human to do it right. 2/

Yes (and, as one, I certainly hope so) but I see a potentially vast reduction in the demand for it.

Everyone is using it to radically cut the time needed to invest in a project to get to the same outcome. And the cost of content generation just went asymptotically to ~0.
1/x

As one who competes in the attention economy, let me tell you: Every day, there is less of it to compete for, and more competitors. And now AI can blow that out to infinity.

Anyone who 'makes content' is now up against infinite competitors. And they are very good. And nearly free.

2/2

Just had another one of those "OMG ChatGPT can do that?" moments.

We're quickly moving past knowledge work, and past knowledge itself. The only frontier after this will be human attention.

The rub is... 1/2

As one who competes in the attention economy, let me tell you: Every day, there is less of it to compete for, and more competitors. And now AI can blow that out to infinity.

Anyone who 'makes content' is now up against infinite competitors. And they are very good. And nearly free.

2/2

Just had another one of those "OMG ChatGPT can do that?" moments.

We're quickly moving past knowledge work, and past knowledge itself. The only frontier after this will be human attention.

The rub is... 1/2

Colorado man dies in crash at intersection where he petitioned for traffic light after wife died there in 2024 A Colorado husband and wife died in crashes at the same Arapahoe County intersection two years apart, prompting renewed concerns for safety.

@carterlavin.bsky.social Oof. www.denverpost.com/2026/03/04/b...

[Episode #211] – Doomers vs. Transitionistas | The Energy Transition Show Why do some people believe we should accelerate the energy transition, while others claim that it will never work and advocate for things like degrowth policies instead?

Thanks Dusty! And @hillelwayne.com ‬... You do realize that "hopium" is a term that skeptics use to denigrate the energy transition? (I did a whole episode about that dialogue: xenetwork.org/ets/episodes...) I would have just gone with "hope."

The Trump EPA & Administrator Lee Zeldin’s Make America Hazardous Again agenda, by the numbers.

This 🧵 examines the 1st reported air pollution data from Trump’s 1st year—using EPA’s own data—showing the harmful impacts of the Trump-Zeldin reckless & dirty, pro-fossil fuel rollbacks & policies. 1/

Those are the right questions... lots of factors in play as always but my guess is that the dominant ones ATM are spare capacity and storage, which are both ample. Could probably bridge over months of disruption.

Given the amount of damage and disruption to the flow of ME oil, it's pretty remarkable that Brent is still below $80 and within it's 52-wk range. A stark difference from the 2008 days.