The Misalignment of Effort in the AI Era
YogeshMalik · x · 2026-07-11
The author argues that AI hasn't just made "effort worthless"; rather, human society has long mistaken certain proxy metrics for actual value.
They describe this as a "species-level sunk cost fallacy": many people spend their lives optimizing proxy metrics like degrees, hours worked, and seniority, failing to realize that the correlation between these metrics and what is actually rewarded may have long been broken. The ultimate question isn't "will effort still be rewarded," but "was I actually being rewarded for my effort in the past, or was I just allowed to believe so?"
More from AGI Musings
- Gary Marcus says LLM math skills are like knowing only a car’s engine size — GaryMarcus · 2026-07-22
- AI may make digital work infinitely leveraged while offline life gets more human — illscience · 2026-07-22
- Better AI math could save researchers time by killing false conjectures earlier — prateekj · 2026-07-22
- AI’s economic forecasts are split by nearly a quadrillion dollars by 2035 — bittingthembits · 2026-07-22
- Open source is becoming tech’s soft power, says Kevin Xu — kevinsxu · 2026-07-22
- OpenAI should keep giving more people access to more powerful AI — jxnlco · 2026-07-22