Our Last Respite

We love work done by geniuses. But we might love work done by those who care even more.

Care can be flow state, focus, love. But just as often it’s compulsion, paranoia, and anxiety. You care because you give a shit - you’d be upset were the product to fail, your ego would be hurt were the company you founded to fall into disrepair. You’d be in pain.

Certainly white collar labor can be modeled as trade in hours of bio compute on chips of various calibre. But much labor, particularly valuable non-commodity labor, is also quite a lot of game theory. Alignment matters and incentives are everything.

If incentives are everything, pain is everything. Contracts are almost ubiquitously drawn up to make some kind of behavior more painful. There’s trust because we know our counterparty hates pain. Consider - which would make a bank more likely to work with a brand-new fintech startup: a slightly smarter founder, or a contract that states the bank can sue the startup into the dirt in the event of a breach?

Superintelligences that can act in the world but feel no pain have been with us since the dawn of time. God gave angels perfect knowledge, and gave man game theory. And so we’re his most beloved, the envy of his creation.

Intelligence can paper over some of these problems, but not others. For some exchanges, some of the time, pain will remain an essential ingredient. As they ever have, founders and startups will wrap software and intelligence with a layer of commitment (pain). Founder mode. Just like managers are pain-wrappers for subordinates (he gets yelled at if the team comes up short), vibe coders might become pain-wrappers for Cursor. Accountability is a cute way to dress it!

This of course, could go south. If pain is our last respite, the last precious quantity we can offer the world, it might get commoditized. After all, how could it possibly be differentiated? An intelligence explosion might not get us to Mars without a pain explosion.

There’s a second dark path this could go. What if to avoid the pain-explosion bit, we simply invented silicon beings that could suffer? It would be scalable.