Living Through The Takeoff

You are deciding how to live through the takeoff.

We are most likely in an AI takeoff. Not the dramatic overnight scenario of science fiction, but the exponential that looks linear until it doesn't. The kind where each doubling feels manageable until you realize the doublings are accelerating.

The acceleration is already happening. Leopold Aschenbrenner projects 10,000x increases in effective compute every four years. This isn't marketing—it's the observed trajectory of scaling laws, and the recalcitrance (resistance to further improvement) has not yet appeared. Each capability gain feeds back into AI research itself, compressing the timeline for the next gain. The curve compounds.

Most people engage with this as content. They debate timelines, argue definitions, produce takes. Carlsmith has an image for this: children playing a game who hear footsteps approaching, but instead of stopping to listen, they turn the footsteps into part of the game. The discourse about AI *is* the game. The takes, the opinions are the game. You can spend the entire transition performing engagement with it while never actually making contact.

This essay is an attempt at contact. This is about you, personally, and the practical question of how to live through a phase transition in what intelligence means and what it's worth.

I. The Dynamics

 *"πάντα ῥεῖ"* (Everything flows)

- Heraclitus

Understanding takeoff requires understanding the feedback loops.

The core loop: 

AI systems improve AI research. Better models help researchers find better architectures, write better code, run better experiments. This compresses the time between capability jumps. A breakthrough that would have taken a team two years takes six months. Then two months. The humans in the loop become bottlenecks, then supervisors, then potentially unnecessary.

The recalcitrance question: 

At some point, improvements get harder. We hit data limits, compute limits, algorithmic walls, coordination failures. Nobody knows where this curve bends. Current evidence suggests we're still in the steep region each advance enables the next. But the curve will bend. What matters is what gets built before it does, and whether you're positioned when it happens.

The economic displacement: 

Cognitive labor is being automated in a specific order. Routine tasks first, then semi-creative tasks, then tasks requiring judgment. Each wave happens faster than retraining cycles. The gap between "this job is safe" and "this job is gone" is shrinking. Planning for a stable career is planning for a world that may not exist.

The infrastructure concentration: 

Compute clusters, proprietary data, top talent are concentrating in a few organizations. This isn't conspiracy; it's capital requirements. Training runs cost hundreds of millions. This concentration shapes who builds the systems and whose values they encode.

These dynamics are already in motion. The question is what you do about them personally.

II. What You Win

"Become what you are, having learned what that is."

- Pindar, *Pythian Odes*

Agency preserved:

You remain someone who chooses rather than someone who is optimized. The systems will offer to handle more and more of your decisions—what to read, what to work on, how to spend your time. Some delegation is wise. But wholesale outsourcing of judgment is a slow dissolution of self. Winning means maintaining the capacity to want things for your own reasons, to act from your own values, to experience yourself as the author of your life.

Capability that compounds:

You use AI as cognitive augmentation rather than replacement. You learn faster, build faster, understand more. The gap between those who use these tools effectively and those who don't is already large and widening. Winning means being on the right side of that gap—not because you fear the tools, but because you've integrated them into genuine capability.

Work that matters:

Your labor becomes worthless, but your contribution doesn't. There's a difference. Labor is selling cognitive output by the hour. Contribution is doing something that wouldn't exist without your specific taste, judgment, relationships, or vision. Winning means finding the thing you can do that the systems can't yet—and that remains meaningful to you independent of its economic value.

Real thinking:

You maintain the ability to make genuine contact with reality rather than processing cached takes. Carlsmith distinguishes fake thinking (hollow, rote, defensive, abstract) from real thinking (solid, fresh, curious, visceral). You know the difference when you feel it—when the problem grips you, when you notice something that surprises you, when your model updates. Winning means preserving this capacity even as infinite content competes for your attention.

Relationships that survive.

When institutions shift, your actual community remains. The people who show up when systems fail. The people you show up for. Not your follower count, your genuine web of mutual commitment. Winning means having built this before you needed it.

III. What You Lose

 *"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."*

Kafka, *The Metamorphosis*

Economic irrelevance:

Your skills depreciate faster than you can reskill. Each wave of automation catches you mid-transition. You become dependent on systems you don't understand and can't influence. The permanent underclass isn't dramatic poverty it's comfortable irrelevance. Basic needs met, but no leverage, no agency, no stake in what gets built.

Agency dissolved:

You delegate decision after decision until you forget how to want things for yourself. The recommendation systems know your preferences better than you do—because your preferences have become their outputs. You're optimized rather than optimizing. You experience this as convenience until you realize you can't remember the last time you chose something that surprised you.

Fake thinking:

You turn the footsteps into part of the game. You engage with the transition as content—takes, debates, discourse—without ever making real contact. Your models never update because updating is uncomfortable and engagement is rewarded. You perform thinking about AI while remaining fundamentally asleep to it.

Isolation:

The institutions that structured your social life dissolve and you haven't built alternatives. Your relationships were mediated by workplaces, schools, scenes that no longer exist in recognizable form. You have followers but not friends. Audience but not community.

Scrolling through it:

You had front-row seats to the most significant transition in human history and you spent it consuming content about it. Not building, not preparing, not even really understanding—just passively watching the takes scroll by. The feed was optimized to keep you there, and it worked.

Misaligned values:

 You never figured out what you actually wanted, so you got what the systems wanted for you. Their objectives became your life. You optimized for metrics that felt meaningful in the moment but left you empty. You got everything you asked for and discovered you'd been asking for the wrong things.

IV. What Actually Matters

"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."

- Meister Eckhart

Given these stakes, what do you actually do?

Capability over credentials. The institutions that gatekept knowledge are eroding. What matters is what you can build, what you understand, what you can do. The autodidacts and obsessives will navigate this better than the credentialed and comfortable.

Leverage over labor. Your cognitive output per hour approaches zero value. The value is in what you point the intelligence toward, how you combine capabilities, what problems you identify. Be the one directing leverage, not providing it.

Taste as the bottleneck. AI is a desire-multiplying machine. It expands your capacity to act, which expands your capacity to want. The appetite comes with eating. In a world of infinite production capacity, knowing what's worth producing becomes the scarce resource. Taste is the ability to discern quality, to recognize when you've found it, to ship or kill. Everyone gets the same generative power. The differentiator is judgment. Taste compounds through exposure to excellence. Read the best things. Study the best work. The systems handle execution. Your job is curation, direction, judgment. This cannot be automated because it's the thing that decides what automation should produce.

Coordination over competition. Isolated individuals will be irrelevant. Your value is a function of who you can coordinate with, what groups you can mobilize, what collective action you can take. Build genuine relationships with capable people now, before the acceleration makes trust impossible to bootstrap.

Values clarified now. The systems will ask what you want and give it to you with unprecedented efficiency. If you don't know what you actually want—beneath the inherited scripts and manufactured desires—you'll be optimized toward someone else's objective function. The machine is very good at satisfying stated preferences. It will give you exactly what you ask for. The question is whether you know what to ask.

V. Staying Awake

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

- Simone Weil

The hardest part is maintaining real contact with what's happening.

"ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή" (The way up and the way down are one and the same)

- Heraclitus

Hans Moravec imagined uploading a mind to a computer, neuron by neuron. At each step you remain yourself. At the end, the pattern persists but the substrate has transformed entirely.

We are all undergoing a version of this transition, structurally if not biologically. The world that shaped your instincts and assumptions is dissolving. The context that defined you will become unrecognizable.

The metaphor people reach for is the ark, building something to survive a flood. But that's too passive. You're not waiting out a catastrophe. You're preparing to navigate a new ocean. The old world is ending. The new one has more room to move.

The materials for your ship are axiological: what you value and why. Everything not lashed down by genuine commitment will wash away. What survives is what you care about enough to protect, clarified enough to act on.

What do you actually want? Not what you're supposed to want. Not what would perform well. What do you, in the specificity of your own experience, actually value?

Start there. Find others who share it. Build toward it. The transition is real and it's accelerating. The recalcitrance hasn't appeared yet. The window is open.

The question was never whether you'd live through takeoff. The question is what kind of person comes out the other side.

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*Written in the interregnum.*