Reckoning and slope episode artwork

EPISODE · Mar 21, 2026 · 9 MIN

Reckoning and slope

from David's Saturday AI Thoughts · host David Boyle

The gap between AI wonder and behaviour change. PwC's CEO says get with it or get out, but the real question is get with what. Jeremy Howard's slope-over-intercept frame: capability growth matters more than current output. Anthropic's research shows most coding tool users enter autopilot. Not all inefficiency is waste: some friction is load-bearing. What happened this week: * Centaur chess inverted: in 2005 amateurs with laptops beat grandmasters, by 2026 adding a human to an engine makes it worse. Carlsen deliberately limits AI prep to maintain self-generated understan... * Jensen Huang's benchmark: $500K engineer should consume $250K in AI tokens. But token spend is an intercept metric that says nothing about slope * RentAHuman: 600,000 sign-ups to a platform where AI agents hire humans for physical tasks. Inverts the usual displacement narrative What to try: * Mine your own email archive: pull months of correspondence on a topic, ask AI to synthesise the intellectual arc * End every AI session the way a developer commits code: one line documenting context for the next session * Use AI to teach you, not just to do things for you: Bloom's two-sigma tutoring now costs a subscription Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-03-21

The gap between AI wonder and behaviour change. PwC's CEO says get with it or get out, but the real question is get with what. Jeremy Howard's slope-over-intercept frame: capability growth matters more than current output. Anthropic's research sho...

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Reckoning and slope

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This episode was published on March 21, 2026.

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The gap between AI wonder and behaviour change. PwC's CEO says get with it or get out, but the real question is get with what. Jeremy Howard's slope-over-intercept frame: capability growth matters more than current output. Anthropic's research shows...

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