---
title: "The Great Outsourcing of the Mind"
url: "https://writing.colivetree.com/3/product/53/the-great-outsourcing-of-the-mind"
---

Published on Feb 9, 2025.

You're trying to get some work done, as usual. Maybe you're putting a document together for your investors, maybe you're defining the requirements document for a feature, you're shaping up the technical architecture for a new component, you're doing financial analysis for a stock, writing a bit of marketing copy for your new ad, writing a legal document, planning a therapy session for one of your patients....

Chances are, you're using an LLM (a Large Language Model). You might still be starting a new conversation with it every time or, if you're an advanced user (you're ahead of the times), you have some custom workflows that make it feel more like a personal assistant that knows you and your past work.

To be honest, as of today, so should you. Some work is just boring, overrun, run-of-the-mill, time-consuming-task-BS. 

You're just optimizing your workflow using a new tool. We all do it, all the time. It's a good thing.

Yet, this tool feels different. First, it's getting better at understanding you by the day - and you don't have to do anything differently. But also, you can give it very little, and it still comes up with something. 

That something may not be just as perfectly unique, but you have so much work to do... It'll have to do the trick, so you can move on to the other 99 things on your plate.

Once you're tuned in to the fact that each task that used to take a whole morning can now be done in under 30 minutes, we've added more. It's jevons paradox for productivity. Our days can pack more punch. We can finally do ALL THE THINGS.

It's our very own self, on intellectual steroids. Tapped into the world's knowledge, digested and distilled, we feel that for 19.99 a month we've become infinite.

Yet what happens next to some of our work is somewhat unsurprising. The zeitgeist term for it is Enshittification. 

Doing the work is cheap and it's easy even if it loses value at the margins. Even if it's a little more mediocre. We've gotten 80% for 20%. Pareto is a proud man, efficiency gains are there for the taking, craftsmanship as a commodity. The tools cease to be the tools and they become the way. The tao. Not using them would be unreasonable, archaic, unproductive, borderline unprofessional.

Time flies past us.

Now most of us barely remember what it's like to do things another way. Our parents still do some of those things, acting as if time isn't of the essence. You hear that in Japan they still do thinking retreats. Quirky mofos.

We've grown so accustomed to outsource our entire thinking process, that most of our work is condensed into pitching what we want out of the machine. The outcome is dissatisfactory but fast. So convenient. It's Uber for thought. It's easyJet's "please cram your entire ego into this lifeless measurement device because you decided to fly for cheap", but for applying to a job where your manager is a robot. At least they sound like one.

It's all very streamlined, there's no back and forth. 

Yet, it fucking sucks.

We'll erode the little edges and rugged bits away from every experience, no friction will be left. It'll all be accessible to a lot more of us. Yet the middle will collapse, and top end privatized. Many things will feel a little shittier. We'll have a hard time figuring out how we arrived at a highly Tetrapak'd, IKEA'd and Doordash'd AI-powered version of existence. At the time of my writing though, there's no turning back. It'll take years, but it is coming.

The great outsourcing of the mind has begun, it's just not evenly distributed.

Now breathe. There will be great artists still, great architects, great software developers. Lots more people will be able to play at the edges of these and really every other discipline. Many more people will be coding, or directing a machine to code on their behalf. Just like many more people can unclog the pipe under their kitchen sink when only a half-dozen variations exist in the developed world. 

But just like in the plumbing example, high accessibility and low friction at the entry point means few of us ever feel the need to venture past the hallway of knowledge and into some midly obscure room of average technical complexity or craftsmanship. The many small wins catalized by the a few unthinkably large ones. 

Does the bone structure of our society hold, in order to keep us together?

We don't know, and some of those in power don't care. That's the Dorian Grayesque beauty of optionality.

For you (who are reading this), and I, who am writing it, it seems like this belongs in the pessimists archive. 

That's not my intention at all. I think there's a version of this where we're all much much better off. Where we take the cost reduction and apply it to solve the world's most pressing challenges, simply because they've been taken off our bureaucratically politicized hands. We need to harness all the freedom, the computing, the man-hours spared by robots, the never-before-seen efficiencies to design a better world. A more beautiful, empathetic, inclusive and welcoming world. A more generous, more forgiving, more truly-connected existence. 

We won't do it by ignoring the perils and simply powering ahead. We also won't be able to stop the train or even delay its progress. We need to ride it. If there's a massive wave coming at you and you're afraid to stand up on your surfboard on time, you'll be sent over the falls, and you'll be under for a long while. You better know how to hold your breath.

We can look at enshittification and the great outsourcing of the mind in 50 years and file them under pessimism of the times. 

I want my daughter to be 10x happier, more fulfilled, more humane than I ever could be. How does this tech help her become that? How does it help us build a future for kids around the globe that take them to another age of abundance beyond what we ever conceived possible. 

It's up to us to bet on them. I recently heard Patti Smith tell Julia Louis-Dreyfus about the clarity that comes from looking at issues through the lens not of the various camps and factions involved in an issue, but of the children being impacted by it. 

There's tremendous clarity in that notion. If, like me, you're building with AI - are you building for the children?