Ruan Human

[Dan Shipper @danshipper]

a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call:

the newsletter is dead

@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly.

persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox
with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to.

i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it.

this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered.

what it means
It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to.

luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new.

we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (https://t.co/L7ergneERt)

it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc.

to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over.

here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: https://t.co/vrozmuWxyj

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

Hark @hark_labs moved my whole Notion workspace into Google Drive in about 1 hour. Thousands of docs, every internal link still working, images back in place. I just talked to it on my phone. Genuinely impressed. Hats off @adcock_brett 👏

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@adcock_brett Computer use please

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@gdb This is a noticeable improvement!

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@hark_labs Spent a few hours with Hark and now:

- my 300+ newsletter subscriptions turn into an instant brief
- it mashes unrelated newsletters into fresh client ideas
- a half-baked ChatGPT plan became a real project

It also respects "don't touch my personal inbox" rare!

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@MattPRD @Muse Me please! 🙏

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@every This is great! Very insightful. I'm curious what the Every team does with custom instructions and personalisation settings... especially whether youve ended up with very different setups for different models?

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@Trenchcoat45 @bad_takes I don't disagree... but it won't be prevented by individual abstention

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@LocalSEO_Guy Sorry, you can try now. Thanks !

[David Shapiro (L/0) @DaveShapi]

Guys I have bad news.

Extraordinarily bad news.

We have 30 to 50 years before we get to full Post-Labor Economics.

The bottleneck isn't intelligence, or even robotics.

It's economic scale.

We ran all the numbers, and ran them again.

The primary question: "how long does it take to build a billion humanoid robots?"

Even if we double production capacity every 3 years, it takes two decades.

But there are multiple constraints: rare earth metals for batteries, actuators, and sensors are the biggest one by far.

Next is economies of scale.

For comparison, it took 92 years for the automobile to reach full saturation: 1900 to 1992. Now, we had a car culture by the 1950s... But that's still five decades and two industrial wars worth of innovation.

We did everything we could to speed it up: pneumatic hybrid robots are a no go. Air tanks need to be swapped every 20-30 minutes.

The ONE saving grace might be exotic actuators like electropolymer muscles. Right now, they just aren't strong enough. BUT, if we can make them stronger and cheaper, our petrochemical industrial base could accelerate the deployment of humanoid robots by a decade or two.

So what does this mean?

We'll hit AGI and ASI long before we can automate away all human labor. We might even hit the Singularity before we can scale up enough robots to replace all jobs.

Here's my current timeline:

2025 to 2030: Collapse of knowledge work. The "KVM Rule" applies: any job you can do entirely with a keyboard, video, and mouse will be fully replaced.

2030 to 2040: Droid scaling up starts to really make a dent.

2040 to 2060: We'll finally reach global labor substitution with robots.

What does this mean? There are a few jobs that are going to stick around for the foreseeable future:

1. Skilled labor. Robots will be able to do your job as a mechanic or welder very soon. However, there simply won't be enough robots to go around.

2. High Accountability Jobs: doctors, lawyers, comptrollers, financial advisors - all jobs that require license, insurance, and accountability. Also called statutory jobs (law requires a human or does not contemplate non-human labor)

3. Meaning Jobs: authenticity and sentimental premium. Celebrities, performers, influencers, athletes, priests, philosophers, and some educators, caretakers, etc

4. Complex Relationship Jobs: politicians, diplomats, negotiators, governance, account executive.

5. Capitalists. The ownership class will be fine. Always is.

So what can you do?

Upskill and reskill. Join the meaning economy or get into skilled trades. All you smart desk jockeys would make great HVAC techs, mechanics, linemen, and more. But just keep in mind you're going to have a lot of stiff competition.

There are a few silver linings to this news:

FIRST it means that we have longer to adapt to total economic upset. Yes, AI and robots will hypothetically be able to take all jobs within 5 years, but human bodies are still more abundant, more portable, and more energy efficient. This is a VERY deep moat.

SECOND it means that a Terminator style takeover is economically impossible. MIL-SPEC and NIST standards mean that ASI can't hack our hardware and even if we have a few AI bots, tanks and aircraft, humans win on sheer volume for many decades to come - more than long enough to solve alignment.

HOWEVER it means we'll have ordinary jobs for a lot longer than we'd like. Deployment will be uneven, so some economies will saturate with robots sooner than others.

BUT this gives PLE an avenue. Create ESOP and cooperatives that own a bunch of robots. That means we collectively buy, own, and operate robots for everything from construction to leasing to businesses, and we collect the rent. Or we tax the crap out of them.

What do you think? Can we figure out a faster way to ramp up humanoid robot production or are we doomed to skilled and unskilled blue collar work for the next generation?

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@SOS_helpers @boringmarketer Reddit

[The Boring Marketer @boringmarketer]

This study completely changed how I use AI to create high-quality content that ranks on search & LLMs.

Breaking down what you need to know (and the results) here:

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@sesame Seriously cool!

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@johnlu0x @OpenAI Not at all. You can use Grok and the cheaper options to refine your Deep Research prompt. Work with intent. Once you know what you want to ask, and how to ask it, the results are pretty damn amazing

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@OpenAI This is far better than anything else out there right now. I've already used all 10 of my monthly cap 🥹

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@attilablenesi So we see this worldwide when? Next year?

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@coffeebreak_YT Use Descript or Elevenlabs.

[Preston Rutherford @PrestonRuther10]

CEO: I hate how our ads are starting to look. I feel like we're starting to come across like used car salesmen.

VP Growth: I feel the same way, but they work.

CEO: What does “they work” actually mean?

VP Growth: They drive revenue. Isn’t that what we want?

CEO: Yes, but there might be a cost to our brand we’re not accounting for.

VP Growth: That sounds hand-wavy. I thought we prided ourselves on being data-driven.

CEO: We do. I’m realizing we haven’t been looking at the right data.

VP Growth: I thought we had all the performance marketing data we could get our hands on.

CEO: Have you been tracking our organic traffic from branded searches?

VP Growth: Sure, quarterly for board meeting prep.

CEO: Great. Is our branded search volume up or down vs last year? By how much? Is traffic from branded search up or down? Is the share of total traffic and total revenue from branded search up or down?

VP Growth: Umm...

CEO: And how often are you looking at ROAS from our ads?

VP Growth: Every 15 minutes during a 9-hour day and a few times after... so roughly 38 times a day.

CEO: So we look at paid media stats 3,420 times more frequently than our organic business driven by branded search?

VP Growth: When you put it that way... but there’s so much noise in that organic number. It goes up with more spend, discounts, new products, and in core season.

CEO: That’s why we strip out the noise and seasonally adjust to get to a resilient baseline representing our brand strength.

VP Growth: How do we get to that baseline? We can’t turn off ads, discounts, and new product launches for a while to see the base.

CEO: Unfortunately, you’re right. Let's use our best judgment and get to a rough, imperfect, directional calculation of the true base.

VP Growth: Nice. Then what?

CEO: Once we have the rough base of branded search volume and revenue, we’ll take 30, 60, 90, and 180-day rolling averages and compare each year over year. Again, it’s imperfect, but we’ll start to get a feel for which look-back period is most useful when evaluating if we're raising the base.

VP Growth: Seems reasonable.

CEO: We’ll pick one KPI to keep things simple. For now, let’s go with branded search volume and allocate 10% of our budgets and 25% of our time to driving that base, and we'll increase as we see signal

VP Growth: Love that. Here’s my realization: All marketing is growth marketing. It’s about generating the biggest totality of high-margin dollars over the mid and long term. We'll have to make the cost cuts now to support the evolution. The spike-stripped-seasonally-adjusted base of branded search volume is a reasonable leading indicator KPI. All our inputs (channels, tactics, creative, targeting, etc.) will be accountable to that output, and it's my job to find those inputs.

CEO: That was epic. You’ll have my job someday.

VP Growth: Thanks, but I’m thinking of getting into used car sales...

[Ruan Human @ruanhuman_]

@Yuchenj_UW So Sam Altman is next