Hey there, I’m Alberto! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge. Paid subscribers also get Monday how-to guides and Friday news commentary. I publish occasional extra articles and essays. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that:
Here’s your weekly guide. This is kind of a follow-up post to “You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing.” In that piece, I walked you through the shift from thinking in terms of “how to do things” to thinking in terms of “what things to do.” Today’s guide is about the main problem that happens when you do this shift.
How do you manage the fact that you can start anything in an afternoon, but finishing it still takes months? What do you do after AI maps out fifteen versions of a better professional career—which you will never be able to incarnate at once—and now your real life seems comparatively insufficient? How do you solve the dilemma between shipping slop at the speed of light vs shipping quality products at the speed of meat, where you—the painfully slow “human in the loop”—are the bottleneck.
Let me exaggerate my point for the sake of quotability: AI can show you infinite paths to infinite futures, but you remain tragically limited to walk only one.
This is an old problem in a new disguise that we need to figure out psychologically. I will help you understand how it emerges and how to deal with it, and will share the advice I apply in my own work.
