The quotable Mr. Livingston had an idea, an AI-inspired thesis. When computers can make images as pristine as the most glorious art at the click of a button; when impeccable contracts can be draft by asking a software to do it; when grand and flowy text can be generated in the millions, the value of human input in those domains change radically. In fact, all the rumbling way to zero. #798342

And so he set out to formulate that idea in an extravagant, excessively dramatic, and overly ornate way, chapter by (almost) digestible chapter, in a 300-page book. In The Great Harvest: AI, Labor, and the Bitcoin Lifeline, we’re told how scarcity and attention — human consciousness — becomes the only remaining sources of value in a world inundated by AI slop.

With the service economy and the information age, “Credentials had replaced calluses as the markers of value" (p. 9). “If you a worker in the cognitive economy,” advises Livingston, “understand that the ground is shifting beneath you more rapidly than institutional rhetoric acknowledges.

The credentials you’ve accumulated, the knowledge you’ve acquired, the expertise you’ve cultivated — all are being systematically devalued not through malice or mismanagement but through the inexorable logic of technological substitution (p. 12)

So, you must adapt. By shifting “from origination to selection, from composition to direction, from writing to filtering.” It’s the taste, the judge of quality, that remains. As a knowledge worker in the age of AI, you must compile, not compete. AI can write, research, draft, assess, analyze, graph, design etc faster and cheaper than you. Here’s the Jeff Booth-like summary in a nutshell (p. 72, 101):

You’re not losing to something that’s better than yourself; you’re losing to, says Livingston (p. 28),

"a thousand slightly inferior versions of yourself that are dramatically cheaper, faster, and infinitely scalable.""a thousand slightly inferior versions of yourself that are dramatically cheaper, faster, and infinitely scalable."

You are not competing against the machines. You are its data. You are the raw material from which it learned to replace you. (p. 40)

Thus, the FINAL THING we must guard, the ultimate moat we have, is human consciousness. It’s “not our capacity to generate content, but our ability to experience meaning. Not our productivity, but our presence. Not what passes through our minds, but what it feels like to be a mind encountering reality.” (p. 83)

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ENTER BITCOIN, the scarce digital thing that cannot be generated at the click of a button (well, my home miner says otherwise). Its value, insofar as it has any… checks price economic command over goods, oops… stems from...

precisely from what cannot be infinitely replicated: computational work, energy expenditure, mathematical verification, and the immutable history of all previous transactions (p. 79)

Bitcoin is the only thing that remains, “Bitcoin is the answer” because “it is the only system deliberately architected to withstand and even thrive in the entropy of infinite intelligence and synthetic abundance.” (p. 101)

And the twist absolutely nobody saw comingAnd the twist absolutely nobody saw coming

Most of this is AI-generated.

Can’t shake the feeling that this is intentional trolling. See, it doesn’t matter that AI produces stuff; we enjoy it nonetheless, its profound conclusions meaningful regardless of their provenance

I do love this shit... but only a few pages at a time, usually read over morning coffee while mentally getting ready for the day. So it took me forever to catch on... I just thought he was flowy and linguistically playful #1414564 ("purple!" see below).

• Dude only a single rhetorical trick – stacking flowy and punchy sentences on top of each other – and it gets old rather quickly. Update: he develops a second as the text progresses, "[Something] is, not X but Y, [move on, double down]"
• Early on, I made a note: "so many paragraphs and so many sentences stink of AI-generation."

The fact that we have a single mode of sentencing(see what I did there, AI anon? I used a word to mean something it really doesn’t but makes sense to a human grasping the context... sentencing = stringing sentences together) is a pretty good indication that this is empty, verbose noise.

If you have one literary trick, even if your overarching story is good, repeating this trick over and over — stacking it to absurdity — becomes tedious:

I plucked all my notes, photos and direct quotes into a half-dozen AI-checkers (the first, say, 50 pages, come back human; the rest is AI slop), including Chat itself – which was the most ruthlessly badass in its commentary:

• "The passage is conceptually heavy but operationally thin," which, I guess, is a nice proxy for the entire book.
• "repetitive semantic looping" and "paraphrastic cycling" – very "purple" (which I had no idea could mean "overly decorative/excessive")
• "Why it screams AI: It’s a perfectly compressed, aphoristic insight that: sounds profound, aligns neatly with current AI discourse, avoids technical commitment"
• "the text is almost a parody-level LLM aphorism"

To double down, Grok added:

This is exactly what happens when you feed a strong first draft into Claude/GPT/o3 with a prompt like “make this more poetic, more philosophical"

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What to do when we get AI tricked?What to do when we get AI tricked?

The moment I had this confirmed, it was way less interesting to engage with these ideas. It’s not that everything AI touches becomes slop, but that Livingston is no longer entitled to waste my time. As @TotallyHumanWriter might say, he broke the trust, the unspeakable bond, between author and reader.

The thing is, I’m don’t disagree with his thesis; I’m fairly persuaded by it, having thought similar things wrt LLM and the economic value of writing and creativity for a while.

I just feel tricked for the way it was delivered, abandoned and betrayed as a reader willingly engaging with a writer’s mind. Knowing that it wasn’t, in fact, the author’s mind changes everything.

Now it makes me resent him rather than be impressed by him and his thesis.

... and ironically (or on purpose?) he delivers exactly the sensation for what’s missing:

The crisis before us is not that humans are becoming less efficient, but that they are becoming less present — and in this absence, less human. (p. 217) The quality of presence — the depth, the duration, the intentionality of attention — emerges as the last non-replicable human resource. [...] authentic attention becomes the ultimate scarce resource!! (p. 222)

And here, the lack of human sacrifice:

The value didn’t evaporate because machines exceeded our capabilities, but because we systematically devalued the intrinsic worth of human struggle, of the necessary friction between effort and achievements.

There was no writer anguishing over formulation, no profound mind considering ideas and battling them within himself/herself, no artistic genius expressing the brilliancy of his internal mind, no "author" going over drafts to improve and crystallize and make succinct his message. Just a machine, infinitely generating text upon text.

When everything can be instantaneously duplicated without degradation, the market clears at precisely nothing. [...] One immutable principle remains: scarcity defines worth. (p. 304, 305)

"Infinite replication inevitably approaches zero marginal utility" (p. 304)"Infinite replication inevitably approaches zero marginal utility" (p. 304)