A ledger of what remains human
What is still ours.
A ledger of human capacities, revised as the frontier moves.
Machines beat us at chess, at Go, in the sciences, in olympiad mathematics. This ledger follows the frontier of what has been ceded to the machine, what is contested, and what is still left to us.
Open the ledger01 · The frontier
02 · Latest essays
All essays- Why keep a ledger
The resentment around the arrival of AI is visible. The frontier of what we are ceding to machines is not. That is why a dated, sourced record is what this moment requires.
- Judgment is not a benchmark
A model wins olympiad gold comfortably, without judging, without deciding. An exam scores the ability to answer questions set by others. Deciding means choosing the question and the answer.
03 · The ledger
Every entry states a capacity that people once carried or still carry, and we give it a status. When that capacity is contested, we attach a date, who contests it and how, and a source for the claim.
Held means no machine performs the act, because the act belongs to a person by its nature, as with bearing responsibility or giving consent. Contested means machines match humans in narrow or disputed settings and the question is still open. Ceded means one of two things, and each line says which: either the best machine result exceeds the best human result on the task as defined, or the task is no longer performed by humans at scale. Every line carries a date and a source. Once a line is ceded it stays so. The ledger records, it does not rank.
Open the ledger- 014Negotiation in the game of DiplomacyContested
- 015Diagnostic reasoning on clinical casesContested
- 016Legal reasoning and researchContested
- 024Bearing responsibilityHeld
- 025Giving consentHeld
- 026Bearing witnessHeld
- 147Picking the arrival of a seismic wave on a recordCeded
- 148Annotating the genes in a newly sequenced genomeCeded
- 174Building airline crew rostersCeded
04 · The thesis
For most of history the question of what only a human can do had a long answer, and the answer was mostly a list of skills. That list is contested by the machines.
This publication keeps two things. A ledger, in which each human capacity has a status against the best machines, with a date and its sources. And essays, which ask what those statuses mean and take the positions the ledger refuses to take.
The ledger is dull on purpose. The essays are not.