Book Brew 181: Escaping Stupid Smart Land

We are currently using mankind's most revolutionary computational mind to avoid writing our own social media captions.

In Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, the town of Haven gets invaded by the influence of an alien ship buried underground. The people start becoming what Jim (one of the main characters) calls "stupid smart."

They can construct elaborate, impossible things:

• Build machines,
• Create telepathic tech that shouldn't exist,
• Harvest energy from living brains.

But they can't see the obvious → they're rewiring their homes and new gadgets with thousands of batteries instead of just tapping into the power lines literally already there.

The Loop That Serves No One

That's exactly how so many seem to be using AI tools right now.

“Shallow work is focused on low-value tasks like emails, social media, and meetings that don't produce meaningful results.” — Cal Newport

I've been reading LinkedIn and Facebook for many years. Recently, it's become a wonderland of AI talking to AI.

• Someone uses ChatGPT to write a post.
• Someone else uses AI to read it, summarize it, and respond.

I’m just over here wondering: What is the actual point?

I feel like we've lost the thread on human-to-human connection. The entire original purpose of these platforms was to connect with one another - not to each other’s chatbots.

We're slowly becoming the lazy characters in WALL-E or Idiocracy or Don’t Look Up or Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (or some wacko combo of them all), offloading our thinking to a machine while the actual world happens around us.

Extraordinary Tech, Mundane Results

We don’t have a problem because AI exists, but because we have been using its extraordinary capability to do extraordinarily mundane things. And we're doing it because it's easy.

“We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think” - Antonio Damasio

You have a tool that can:

• Identify disease patterns in medical data at scale
• Accelerate drug discovery by years
• Prove mathematical theorems
• Discover new physics
• Transform how we understand biology

But instead, you're using it to write email subject lines and generate LinkedIn posts that nobody's actually reading because they were written by the same machine writing the response.

The townspeople in Tommyknockers aren't dumb. They might be losing their teeth and becoming transparent, but they also aren’t incapable. But they are corrupted by ease, building elaborate systems on top of the lazy choice.

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." - Tyler Durden

We're doing the same thing. Except our batteries are AI-generated content that nobody reads, AI-summarized summaries of AI-written posts, and an entire ecosystem built on offloading thinking to machines while the real work (the work that matters) sits untouched.

What Real Transformation Looks Like

“Pain + Reflection = Progress” - Ray Dalio

Google AlphaFold figured out protein folding by asking: What if we could predict protein structures? What if we could understand biology at a scale humans never could?

Claude Science is sitting on the same frontier but with a different question: What if we used this tool to accelerate scientific discovery? What if we used it to help researchers think bigger?

The conversation has been stuck on: "What can AI do?"

I say we reframe it to: "What should AI do, and what am I willing to sacrifice to make that happen?"

Because the big things require risk. They require stakes (and no, not the ones used to slay vampires in Salem’s Lot). They require you to encode instead of offload. They require judgment.

Most people will keep stacking batteries, stuck in Stupid Smart Land. They'll keep using AI to write content that AI will read, in a loop that serves no one. And they'll feel productive because the tool makes it easy.

Some people will ask different questions.

• What if we used this to change medicine?
• What if we used this to discover something new?
• What if we used this to grow our business?
• What if we used this to think instead of replace thinking?

PONDER THIS

1. What problem are you actually avoiding by using AI for the small stuff instead of the big stuff?
2. What's the smallest, most obvious thing you're not seeing about how AI could transform something that matters to you?
3. Are you "stupid smart" right now—capable of building something extraordinary but choosing something safe instead?
   
   

Books

• The Tommyknockers - Stephen King
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain - Antonio Damasio
• Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
• Principles - Ray Dalio
• Salem’s Lot - Stephen King
• Deep Work - Cal Newport

Ready to escape Stupid Smart Land?

Ctrl+Alt+Delete on your current Stupid Smart AI strategy and work with us to rebuild something that matters. 

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