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Perched on a dusty high desert plain about 100 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, the Mojave Air and Space Port looks more like a final destination for aerospace experiments than a stepping stone to the stars. A field with dozens of decommissioned commercial jetliners bakes in the early morning sunitll eventually hit 110 degrees around noonand the small shacks set between dusty roads and cracked pavement look mostly empty. But drive past cracked airstrips and barbed wire gates, andwith the right security clearanceyou may be able to walk up and touch the exterior of the next orbital space station: a 2-ton cylindrical aluminum module built by the startup Vast. Called Haven-1, it currently hangs from a 50-foot-tall steel scaffold while it undergoes extreme pressure testing, one of many complicated engineering milestones it needs to hit before its planned launch in May 2026. Before engineers can install the modules instrumentation, electronics, and life-support systems, they need to repeatedly pressurize the structure to 2.4 times Earths atmosphere to test its workmanship. Massive hoses hooked up to a trio of multistory liquid nitrogen tankers inflate the stationan isogrid metal shell that resembles a waffle conewith nitrogen gas, like a kids birthday balloon. Observers need to stand at least 236 feet away in case bolts or brackets burst. During a visit in May, workers were welding and reinforcing the steel scaffold to make sure the structure can withstand a grueling and aggressive series of stress tests that will see the cabin inflated and deflated 200 times in a row. Fully-built flight-like control moment gyroscope (CMG). [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Vast is racing against the clock to launch the worlds first commercial space stationindependently, in-house, and in record time. Its an audacious effort, made possible by the retirement of an icon: the International Space Station, a fixture of childhood imaginations and of humanitys exploration of space since its first section was launched in 1998. Its now set to be decommissioned in 2030, via a guided crash into the Pacific Ocean, and Vast wants to replace it. Were going from an unknown to a formidable competitor, says Vast CEO Max Haot, a Belgian-American serial entrepreneur. Founded in 2021 by American crypto entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, who served as CEO until Haots arrival in 2023, Vast has grown to a team of nearly 1,000 people intent on building the next generation of human habitation in space. The company is entirely funded by McCaleb, who has invested $1 billion in the startup. NASA launched a competition for its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program five years ago, setting a date of 2026 to choose a team and design to eventually replace the ISS. Vast wasnt even around when the space agency awarded three teams seed funding to develop their visions: Starlab, Northrop Grumman, and a collaboration between Sierra Space and Blue Origin. Thats led Vast to adopt an accelerated approach that it hopes will ultimately prove its efficiency. To lap more established competitors, Haot is pushing his company to launch a prototype model before anybody else even submits their final proposal. Haot refers to other prospects as paper designs. Vast is already in the building phase. At the companys sprawling 190,000-square-foot factory in Long Beach, a three-building complex once meant to be an Amazon warehouse, the deadline is palpable. There are space gadgets around every corner of the bustling workshop floor. In the back, staff are testing a device called a CMG (control moment gyroscope), fast-moving flywheels that will spin and orient the capsule. One set has been spinning for two and a half years to test its durability. A few stations away, massive chunks of raw aluminum are being cut via water jet and plasma welded into gridded exterior panels. Next door, quality control engineers are shooting those panels with a special gun that simulates orbital velocity, to ensure they can withstand the impact of small meteorites or space debris. Visitors can even tour a full-scale model of the white, wood-paneled station interior, dubbed the Haven Experience; weightlessness, sadly, not included. Fully integrated Haven Demo [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Vast is at the forefront of a generational technological shift thats underpinning the next push into space. Vast and its competitors arent radically reinventing the tech that made the original ISS possible. Instead, theyre attempting to launch a space station in a better, faster, and cheaper manner. The ISS, with an estimated $150 billion construction budget, was a custom made Italian sports car. The space stations that Vast and its ilk are trying to build are more an assembly-line luxury sedan, still pricy, but ultimately much more accessible. Mason Peck, a Cornell professor and a former NASA chief technologist, says that while tech billionaires like McCaleb are bankrolling or running many key startups, building out more private, commercial ways to get to space tends to democratize access. From crypto to the moon McCaleb made his estimated $2.9 billion fortune by founding key cryptocurrency projects and following his hunches. He launched the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange in 2010 after becoming interested in Bitcoin. To create the exchange, he repurposed an old website that he had made for trading Magic: The Gathering cards. (The domain name originally stood for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange.) In 2011, he sold the site, which at one point was handling 70% of global bitcoin transactions. It collapsed a few years later after losing nearly $350 million in Bitcoin due to hacks. By then, McCaleb had moved on, founding the cryptocurrency Ripple, which has provided the bulk of his fortune, and then Stellar, an online payment system. McCaleb explains his decision to step away from Stellar and divert more than a third of his crypto fortune to a space startup as an opportunity to follow his passion. Humankind, he believes, needs a frontier, a vision, something to strive for. As a kid, McCaleb told friends that he would mine an asteroid someday. Now he wants to help people to live outside of the solar system. But hes the first to acknowledge that Vast wont work without a viable business model. Vast CEO Max Haot standing by the Haven-1 primary structure. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] It is a little hand-wavy, because this has never been done before, says McCaleb, of creating a working business out of launching and running a commercial space station. [Space is] an emerging market, and were not exactly sure how itll shape up. But Im pretty sure if people want to be a part of it, then we will need habitation. Theoretical as it may be, space startups and industry analysts alike paint the race to replace the ISS as essential for the future of the commercial space industry. Vast and its ilk are seeking to create whats essentially an office in the sky for NASA, which would attract the billions of dollars the agency has traditionally spent on the ISS every year and help develop (very valuable) human habitation tech for moon and Mars missions. We’re not building a space station, we are building an economy, says Brad Henderson, chief commercial officer of Starlab Space, one of Vasts more established competitors. This is a piece of commercial real estate that is continuing on the legacy of what the world has done [with ISS]. But space station competitors also want to create a base for futuristic, low-gravity manufacturing, which has been shown to impactand even optimizecrystalline and molecular growth. Haot calls microgravity manufacturing the holy grail. Startups have already shown that manufacturing in space can lead to more pure fiber-optic cables, called ZBLAN, and pharmaceuticals. Southern California startup Varda has manufactured more pure versions of the HIV drug ritonavir on its satellite. Vast employee looking at Haven-1 flight panel post machining. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] You know that 30-year period when we went from biplanes made of cloth in the 1920s to traditional commercial jets in the 50swhen aircraft went from the domain of reckless people to an experience for everyday business travelers? says Peck, from Cornell. Thats kind of where we are right now with space. The potential of getting the next-gen space station right has some worried about what might go wrong. Starlabs Henderson frames the competition as a battle between companies with competence and experience and newer players that are trying to fast-track the engineering and launch process. His company is a collaboration between Mitsubishi, Airbus, Palantir, and Northrop Grumman. He sees the rightful successor to the ISS as coming from a company that can build international alliances, foster a space economy, and be a methodical, safe builder (Starlab doesnt plan to launch anything until mid-2029). To him, going really fast isnt the answer, and may be a liability. If youre trying to verticalize a brand-new company in a brand-new way, get it 100% right the first time, and go like a bat out of hell, the likelihood something small will go wrong, and you could have catastrophic failures, is high, he says. Minimum viable station Two things led Haot to becoming the CEO of Vast. The first was a tour of Cape Canaveral that he took in 1985 while visiting the U.S. as an 11-year-old. Cape Canaveral is where, if all things go right, the Falcon 9 rocket carrying Vasts Haven-1 station will launch next year. The second was his partial success with a startup he founded and ran, called Launcher, which attempted to build a rocket quickly and cheaply. With just $30 million and an assist from SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket, the firm put a pair of satellites into space in 2023, though they failed shortly after deployment. The company also landed a government contract to develop its rocket technology, though it never launched. The scrappy operation impressed McCaleb when he met Haot in 2022. Haot was seeking funding. McCaleb countered by acquiring Launcher in February 2023 and putting Haot in charge of day-to-day operations at Vast. McCaleb had stepped away from Ripple a few years earlier and, looking for the next chapter, began looking into starting a space company. He talked to friends, and friends of friends, speaking to anybody who knew about the industry, until he found himself in a hotel in Marina Del Rey in the summer of 2021 with a trio of engineers, including Colin Smith, whos still with Vast. They started laying out a strategy to win the NASA contest for an ISS replacement. First, theyd focus on the station module itself and not worry abou creating a launch system; theyd utilize SpaceX and the Falcon 9 to get the capsule into space. Second, theyd look to create a minimum viable product. Initially, the team wanted to build a more elaborate module with artificial gravity (a concept still in Vasts long-term game plan). But the initial launch, Haven-1, will be smaller, with the station set to orbit for just three years, but only have humans on board for separate, 10-day missions. Haven-1 corridor inside the Haven-1 Experience featuring the entry hatch, various consumable storage and systems in addition to the 4-person sleeping berth for the crew. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Haven-1 will be a leap forward from the cramped, utilitarian quarters of the ISS, with a sizable viewing port, Starlink internet access, interior wood paneling, and white walls that recall a spa. It wont, however, include facilities like a bathroom, or be habitable beyond short stints in space. During crewed missions, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will dock with Haven-1, and, to the relief of astronauts, provide access to a working bathroom and a means of leaving in case of an emergency. These choices allow Vast to build a smaller, lightweight structureand to do most of it in-house. The Vast team is shaping and welding Haven-1s aluminum form, along with designing and manufacturing its own batteries and avionics. Its even sewing the crews uniforms, thanks to a team of seamstresses who sit on the factory floor. Being vertically integrated, argues Haot, means you dont waste time and money outsourcing key components Haven-1 primary structure qualification article on the Vast-built test stand in Mojave, California. [Photo: Courtesy of Vast] Most of the technology underpinning this space is based off of previous ISS tech. As Vast engineers put it, nothing here is zero to one. Haot argues that the biggest challenge, the real zero to one, has been assembling the team and building a new culture within a few years. Thats where he thinks Vast has a huge advantage. He says the best engineers want ownership of their work and the thrill of seeing it launch; signing on for a space firm bankrolled by a billionaire with a plan to hit orbit in a few years is compelling. Haot says that at other companies, founders, and leaders need to sell workers on the mission, and get talent to take a leap of faith. But were putting together a station in space, he added. I dont have to convince anybody here. Growing competition Vast does have to convince NASA, which will not only be evaluating other contestants, but figuring out its own road map. The agency is facing proposed budget cuts of up to 25% under President Donald Trump. The president also scuttled space industry veteran Jared Isaacmans nomination to lead NASA in late May. Even so, in early June, a NASA spokesperson confirmed the agency will finalize its requirements for the ISS successor this year and evaluate teams next year. Competitors include Starlab, Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, and the Houston-based startup Axiom Space, which plans to attach one of its modules to the ISS in 2027. Each company is taking a slightly different route. Blue Origin said in a statement to Fast Company that its leveraging the substantial investment NASA has made with the firm on the lunar program, arguing that technology in development for lunar missions can also be used for the companys Orbital Reef space station. In December 2024, Blue Origin ran a trial in a full-scale mock-up of the station at a site outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, but that didnt include any working hardware. It declined to disclose how much money has been invested in Orbital Reef. Vast employee inspects a portion of the Haven-1 development primary structure. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Axiom was cofounded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, the former program manager of the ISS who sent the first commercial passengers to the station. The company embarked on the AX-4 mission to the ISS in late June, taking an astronaut to the space station via a SpaceX Falcon 9, and plans to launch a module that will connect with the ISS in 2027. It has raised $505 million in venture capital funding. Meanwhile Starlab, which brings together heavy hitters from Airbus and Mitsubishi, continues to build alliances and research collaborations. Former NASA chief technologist Peck believes the challenge for any competitor i being in the right placewith the right tech, strategy, and approachwhen NASA figures out just what it wants to do. He argues theres a good chance it will default towards the team with the most traditional space résumé. That perspective favors teams like Starlab and Axiom, which have more experience with the ISS and NASA, and puts relatively inexperienced Vast at a distinct disadvantage. I don’t think it’s enough to build something, Peck says. I think it’s necessary for the successful contractor to have credible experience in space systems that span many years. So my opinion, from a business strategy perspective, is, if they haven’t already got it, they’re not going to get it this way. 1/20 model of Haven-1 with SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] The next six months will likely be a defining time for Vast. Once it finishes testing the current Haven-1 model in the Mojave, it will have to repeat those tests for the flight version of the space station starting this summer. When thats done, the module returns to Long Beach for integration, a process of outfitting the entire structure with electronics and avionics that will see the weight of the capsule go from 4 to 14 tons. Later this year, Vast will also launch a small satellite to test its avionics systems in space. A fully integrated Haven-1 will be transported to the NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio for a series of vibration, acoustic, and thermal vacuum tests. The FCC also has to approve a reentry plan for the station. If all that goes right, the approved module then gets shipped to Cape Canaveral for a scheduled May 26 launch. The Haven-1 Lab inside the Haven-1 Experience. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] These technical and quality control challenges, substantial as they are, may pale in comparison to the political and bureaucratic hurdles the company faces. McCaleb says that economics of commercial space stations hinge on the success of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which will be able to carry 10 times the payload of the currently used Falcon rocket. In May, Starship’s ninth test flight ended in yet another explosion. Meanwhile, NASAs pending budget crisis, as well as rumors that the proposed MAGA-friendly head, former U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven Kwast, is more likely to favor viewing space as a battlefield, suggest commercial research in space may be deprioritized. But McCaleband the 900-plus people scrambling to get Haven-1 in orbithave a harder time envisioning a world without a space station circling miles above the globe. I just don’t see a world where the U.S. doesn’t have a station that they can go to, said McCaleb. That seems like a huge step back.
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In 2014, I left a secure job at Goldman Sachs to start a nonprofit. On paper, it looked like a reckless move: no funding, no team, barely any experience. But it was the best decision I ever made because it taught me that adaptability matters more than certainty. While you cant control President Trumps second term, you can control how you respond to it by learning to work with uncertainty. As his policies rock supply chains, jobs, and lives, the best career plan is the one that can bend and flex. Transformation But lets be clear: Its not just Trump driving this uncertainty. AI and automation are transforming entire industries. Generational shifts are changing how people work and what they value in their careers. No matter whos in the White House, uncertainty is constant. The message couldnt be more explicit: Nothing is guaranteed except the importance of adaptability. This is what I call Trump-proofing your career, and its not about being anti-Trump. Whether you support him or not, his leadership brings unpredictability, and your career plan cant hinge on any one leader or policy. It must be built to flex and shift with the world around you. The old idea of climbing a single career ladder no longer holds up. In today’s job market, staying in the same role for too long can hold you back. According to HRreview, workers who change jobs regularly earn, on average, 31% more than those who stick around in the same job for years. The best plan isnt a perfect five-year road map. Its about treating your career like an ongoing experiment, in which trying new roles, taking smart risks, and building transferable skills is more important than following a linear path. This mindset keeps you adaptable and engaged in a world thats changing faster than any one job can keep up with. The ripple effects of this new reality are already apparent. More than 120,000 U.S. federal workers have lost their jobs or been targeted for layoffs in 2025, a stark reminder that even government work, once considered the gold standard for stability, isnt immune to sudden change. THE PLANNING FALLACY According to psychologists, the planning fallacy is how we fool ourselves into thinking the future will follow our plans. Ive seen this firsthand. At 22, I thought I wanted to work in finance. I had spent years pursuing that path, convinced it was the surest way to build a successful career. But once I got there, I realized that the skills I wanted to develop and the goals I cared about didnt match what I was doing. The daily work didnt challenge me in the ways I needed, and it didnt lead me in a meaningful direction. I realized that sticking with a path that didnt fit was actually riskier than stepping into the unknown. So I did it. I moved back to Canada to build something that felt real and important, which pushed me to grow in the right ways. This led me to founding my nonprofit, Venture for Canada, which raised $80 million and empowered more than 10,000 young professionals to launch their careers. Most people thought I was out of my mind. But I learned that real progress in your career and life happens when youre willing to adapt your skills and goals to match what you and the world at large need most. Not everyone can walk away from a steady paycheck. My story is just one example. But adaptability isnt about giant leaps. Its about small experiments that keep you aligned with what matters most. FOCUS ON OBJECTIVES AND KEY RESULTS One tool thats made a real difference for me is using objectives and key results. OKRs are a great way to break down overwhelming goals into small, measurable steps. Instead of mapping out the next 10 years, focus on the next three months. Pick one meaningful short-term objective, like exploring mission-driven work or building skills in a new sector. Then set two or three key resultssmall, specific actions you can track. At the end of three months, look back. What worked? What didnt? Where do you need to pivot? Heres how I explain this in my upcoming book, The Uncertainty Advantage: First, identify your top three personal values. For example, if youre in marketing, your values might be creativity, collaboration, and growth, which inspire you when the world is unpredictable. Second, set one short-term objective that aligns with those values. Dont worry about the next decade. Focus on what you can start todaysomething specific and achievable, like launching a new marketing campaign that pushes your creative skills and brings your team together. Third, define two or three key results to measure your progress. In this marketing example, your key results might be testing three campaign concepts, meeting with two colleagues to brainstorm fresh ideas, and sharing early results with your manager within the month. Theyre small steps that build momentum, keep you learning, and help you stay adaptable. TREAT YOUR CAREER LIKE AN EXPERIMENT For some, adaptability might mean staying the course in a stable job. For others, it might mean pivoting into something entirely new. The key is to treat your career like an experiment. If you treat your next move as a chance to test what you care about and what you can build, you can shift from panic to purpose. I think of a friend who shifted from teaching to technical program management and now wants to work in AI. He didnt have a 10-year plan. He focused on what sparked his curiosity and where he wanted to grow. It wasnt about having all the answers. It was about testing, learning, and staying true to his values. So heres my challenge to you: Treat your career like the most crucial experiment of your life. Stay curious. Stay connected to what matters. Keep testing new ideas. Because in a world that can shift overnightand it willthe only plan that keeps working is the one youre willing to adapt.
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For centuries, weve believed that the act of thinking defines us. In what is widely considered a major philosophical turning point, marking the beginning of modern philosophy, secular humanism, and the epistemological shift from divine to human authority, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (15961650) famously concluded that everything is questionable except the fact that we think, Cogito, ergo sum(I think, therefore I am). Fast-forward a few hundred years, however, and in an age where generative AI can produce emails, vacation plans, mathematical theorems, business strategies, and software code on demand, at a level that is generally undistinguishable from or superior to most human output, perhaps its time for an update of the Cartesian mantra: I dont think . . . but I still am. Indeed, the more intelligent our machines become, the less we are required to think. Not in the tedious, bureaucratic sense of checking boxes and memorizing facts, but in the meaningful, creative, cognitively demanding way that once separated us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The irony, of course, is that only humans could have been smart enough to build a machine capable of eliminating the need to think, which is perhaps not a very clever thing. Thinking as Optional Large segments of the workforce, especially knowledge workers who were once paid to think, now spend their days delegating that very function to AI. In theory, this is the triumph of augmentation. In practice, its the outsourcing of cognition. And it raises an uncomfortable question: if we no longer need to think in order to work, relate to others, and carry out so-called knowledge work, what is the value we actually provide, and will we forget how to think? We already know that humans aren’t particularly good at rationality. Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that we mostly operate on heuristics (fast, automatic, and error-prone judgments). This is our default System 1 mode: intuitive, unconscious, lazy. Occasionally, we summon the energy for System 2(slow, effortful, logical, proper reasoning). But it’s rare. Thinking is metabolically expensive. The brain consumes 20% of our energy, and like most animals, we try to conserve it. In that sense, as neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett noted, the brain is not for thinking; its for making economic, fast, and cheap predictions about the world, to guide our actions in autopilot or low energy consumption mode. So what happens when we create, courtesy of our analytical and rather brilliant System 2, a machine that allows us to never use our brain again? A technology designed not just to think better than us, but instead of us? Its like designing a treadmill so advanced you never need to walk again. Or like hiring a stunt double to do the hard parts of life, until one day, theyre doing all of it, and no one notices youve left the set. The Hunter-Gatherer Brain in a High-Tech World Consider a parallel in physical evolution: our ancestors didnt need personal trainers, diet fads, or intermittent fasting protocols. Life was a workout. Food was scarce. Movement was survival. The bodies (and brains) weve inherited are optimized to hoard calories, avoid unnecessary exertion, and repeat familiar patterns. Our operating model and software is made for hungry cavemen chasing a mammoth, not digital nomads editing their PowerPoint slides. Enter modernity: the land of abundance. As Yuval Noah Harari notes, more people today die from overeating than from starvation. So we invented Ozempic to mimic a lack of appetite and Pilates to simulate the movement we no longer require. AI poses a similar threat to our minds. In my last book I, Human, I called generative AI the intellectual equivalent of fast food. It’s immediate, hyper-palatable, low effort, and designed for mass consumption. Tools like ChatGPT function as the microwave of ideas: convenient, quick, and dangerously satisfying, even when they lack depth or nutrition. Indeed, just like you wouldnt choose to impress your dinner guests by telling them that it took you just two minutes to cook that microwaved lasagna, you shouldnt send your boss a deck with your three-year strategy or competitor analysis if you created with genAI in two minutes. So dont be surprised when future professionals sign up for thinking retreats: cognitive Pilates sessions for their flabby minds. After all, if our daily lives no longer require us to think, deliberate thought might soon become an elective activity. Like chess. Or poetry. The Productivity Paradox: Augment Me Until Im Obsolete Theres another wrinkle: a recent study on the productivity paradox of AI shows that while the more we use AI, the more productive we are, the flip side is equally true: the more we use it, the more we risk automating ourselves out of relevance. This isnt augmentation versus automation. Its a spectrum where extreme augmentation becomes automation. The assistant becomes the agent; the agent becomes the actor; and the human is reduced to a bystander . . . or worse, an API. Note for the two decades preceding the recent launch of contemporary large language models and gen AI, most of us knowledge workers spent most of their time training AI on how to predict us better: like the microworkers who teach AI sensors to code objects as trees or traffic lights, r the hired drivers that teach autonomous vehicles how to drive around the city, much of what we call knowledge work involves coding, labelling, and teaching AI how to predict us to the point that we are not needed. To be sure, the best case for using AI is that other people use it, so we are at a disadvantage if we dont. This produces the typical paradox we have seen with other, more basic technologies: they make our decisions and actions smarter, but generate a dependency that erodes our adaptational capabilities to the point that if we are detached from our tech our incompetence is exposed. Ever had to spend an entire day without your smartphone? Not sure what you could do. Other than talk to people (but they are probably on their smartphones). Weve seen this before. GPS has eroded our spatial memory. Calculators have hollowed out basic math. Wi-Fi has made knowledge omnipresent and effort irrelevant. AI will do the same to reasoning, synthesis, and yes, actual thinking. Are We Doomed? Only If We Stop Trying Its worth noting that no invention in human history was designed to make us work harder. Not the wheel, not fire, not the microwave, and certainly not the dishwasher. Technology exists to make life easier, not to improve us. Self-improvement is our job. So, when we invent something that makes us mentally idle, the onus is on us to resist that temptation. Because heres the philosophical horror: AI can explain everything without understanding anything. It can summarize Foucault or Freud without knowing (let alone feeling) pain or repression. It can write love letters without love, and write code without ever being bored. In that sense, its the perfect mirror for a culture that increasingly confuses confidence with competence: something that, as Ive argued elsewhere, never seems to stop certain men from rising to the top. What Can We Do? If we want to avoid becoming cognitively obsolete in a world that flatters our laziness and rewards our dependence on machines, well need to treat thinking as a discipline. Not an obligation, but a choice. Not a means to an end, but a form of resistance. Here are a few ideas: Be deliberately cognitively inefficientRead long-form essays. Write by hand. Make outlines from scratch. Let your brain feel the friction of thought. Interrupt the autopilotAsk yourself whether what youre doing needs AI, or whether its simply easier with it. If its the latter, try doing it the hard way once in a while. Reclaim randomnessAI is great at predicting what comes next. But true creativity often comes from stumbling, wandering, and not knowing. Protect your mental serendipity. Use genAI to know what not to do, since its mostly aggregating or crowdsourcing the wisdom of the crowds, which is generally quite different from actual wisdom (by definition, most people cannot be creative or original). Teach thinking, not just promptingPrompt engineering may be useful, but critical reasoning, logic, and philosophical depth matter more. Otherwise, were just clever parrots. Remember what it feels like to not knowCuriosity starts with confusion. Embrace it. Lean into uncertainty instead of filling the gap with autocomplete. As Tom Peters noted, if you are not confused, you are not paying attention. Thinking Is Not Yet Extinct, But It May Be Endangered AI won’t kill thinking. But it might convince us to stop doing it. And that would be far worse. Because while machines can mimic intelligence, only humans can choose to be curious. Only we can cultivate understanding. And only we can decide that, in an age of mindless efficiency, the act of thinking is still worth the effort, even when it’s messy, slow, and gloriously inefficient. After all, I think, therefore I am was never meant as a productivity hack. It was a reminder that being human starts in the mind, even if it doesnt actually end there.
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