People with ADHD are the master race. What we call “self-discipline” is nothing more than the slave temperament — necessary for early-stage civilizations to get off the ground, but increasingly unnecessary as knowledge work is automated. Every man in a cubicle is a Bronze Age farmer.

Now that we have little genies that do our cognitive labor for us — slower and worse, perhaps, but faster and better by the day — the earth moves; virtue becomes vice and vice, virtue. A generative brain motivated by novelty will excel while the staid workhorse falls behind. The effective management of genies demands new merits; the bottleneck in knowledge work shifts to how many tasks you can track at once and how quickly you adapt to each context … once-vaunted virtues like ‘concentration’ and ‘work ethic’ become quaint curiosities of a time past, replaced by qualities comorbid with so-called ‘executive dysfunction:’ the brain at play, the eye that strays, and the spirit of restless exploration.

So far so good, but what comes next? We’ve seen how, as humanity advances, we supplement and replace our lower functions with technology: memory with books, navigation with maps, calculation with computers — and now reasoning with artificial intelligence. We’ve always been cyborg, and as technology creeps up the human stack we eagerly trade more of our flesh away.

But what remains the human core? When AI can not only complete tasks but identify and generate new ones better than us, when human skill and intellect is ultimately obsolete, when even essays and art are automatable and abundant, what seat is left for humanity on Earth? The reign of the attention deficit proves shorter than imagined.

Perhaps, after ceding all production to the machine, we are relegated to social artifacts, public figureheads for AI-generated agendas like K-Pop stars performing songs written in laboratories. (Indeed, looking at Substack, many are already chomping at the bit. Zing!)

Or maybe we retreat from the life of the mind entirely, and a new Dionysian spirit sweeps across the world, newfound prosperity birthing a hotblooded age of group sex / combat sports / ecstatic dance / disco parties / meditation retreats, and we’ll all look back at the short two decades where geeks managed to make money and accrue status and bend pop culture to their whims until they automated themselves out of it all and laugh … rest in peace the Age of the Nerd, dated Zuckerberg to Altman. Jocks back on top.

But despite leaving a top CS program to do event management instead, I don’t have faith technology won’t replace these functions either. Just as Claude will one day be the best conversationalist in the world, casting all humanity as tactless assholes unless they outsource this, too, to technology — so, too, will VR Roblox-GTA-69 sublimate sports and camaraderie while TikTokGoonbot2000 siphons all sex drive and romance. Human relationships will be an aristocratic oddity, a class intuition impossible to communicate to our kids. “OK Zoomer! Whatever … I’ll be in my gooncave.”

I see only one solace, one last bastion of human agency in the universal circuitry. And that is taste. We may lose all industrial, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral production to the machine, consigned to be nothing more than ultimate consumers — but even consumers exercise their judgement. The New Man of the era is a sommelier of slop; you must cultivate your own garden. The real problem with wireheading is that it’s ugly. If we have any responsibility left, it is to build a social apparatus to nurture taste in others, to foster their will to tailor their life according to a new aesthetic of human flourishing. The only two future jobs are hipster — and heroin addict.