people don’t realize that the majority of toilets go unused all day
imagine a future where your toilet can go out into the world and make money for you
imagine renting out your self driving toilet to your neighbours
Claude Tag is a Trojan horse. Not because Anthropic is doing anything evil. Because the incentives are obvious.
Day one, this looks like a great feature: tag Claude in Slack, let it follow the thread, remember context, connect to tools, break down tasks, chase work, and act like a teammate.
But that is exactly the problem. The moment your AI vendor becomes a shared coworker, it stops being just a model provider. It starts becoming the place where work is interpreted, remembered, routed, and eventually executed.
That is not model lock-in. That is context lock-in. You are now renting your company back from them.
Models can be swapped. Agents can be copied. But the memory of how your company actually works is much harder, maybe impossible, to move: the Slack scar tissue, the exception paths, the customer promises, the unfinished threads, the weird workflows, the implicit owners, the “we tried that in Q2 and it failed” knowledge.
Once that lives inside one vendor’s agent layer, you are not renting intelligence anymore. You are renting your company’s operating memory.
And the pricing model makes it even more dangerous. A human coworker has a salary. Claude has unbounded tokenized activity. The more work moves through it, the more the vendor captures not just IT spend, but labor spend.
This is the enterprise bargain people will regret: Convenience now, and rapid decent into dependency.
The right architecture is simple: rent the best intelligence from whoever is best this month. OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, open source, whatever. But own the context layer.
Your company memory should be inspectable, permissioned, portable, and model-neutral. It should not be buried inside the same vendor that sells you the intelligence and the workflow surface.
Claude Tag is useful. That is why it is dangerous. Rent the intelligence, but own the context. Or, regret later.
A 25-year-old housewife in Chennai earns ₹250/hour ($3) just by doing her normal housework.
She wears a phone on her head and records herself making coffee, cutting fruit, folding laundry.
These first-person videos get sent to AI companies training humanoid robots to handle real-world tasks. She shoots 90+ clips a day.
Her quote: "Who else will pay you ₹250/hour ($3) an hour just for doing housework?"
She's part of a growing gig economy in India where thousands are doing the same thing, filming everyday life to train the robots of tomorrow.
Prepare for takeoff. ✈️ Flight simulator is now available globally on web to all users. https://t.co/hQP0No142P
We've recently added many our most powerful professional desktop features to web. Elevation profiles, new import types, but there's always been one other feature you've been asking us to add to the web version of Google Earth, just for fun...
Where will you fly? Share your best maneuvers, views, and flyovers with us!
Connecting young people to digital networks serves no purpose if they remain disconnected from themselves, others, and their own interiority. We must help young people rediscover silence, reflection, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationships, and openness to transcendence. To listen to the soul, we must lend an ear, because the soul's voice is not a shout, but a whisper.
There will be no AI jobpocalypse.
The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it.
I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines.
Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%.
Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable!
Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more.
Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus.
To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market.
Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades.
Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have).
Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future!
[Original text in The Batch newsletter.]
🇯🇵A Japanese developer built an app that puts a fat cat on your screen and forces you to take a break
Silicon Valley spent billions on wellness platforms, mindfulness subscriptions, and digital detox retreats
A guy in Japan said: fat cat, problem solved