There is a price for a unit of thinking, and it is falling faster than almost any price in the modern economic record. In November 2022, querying a machine that could perform at roughly the level of a competent generalist cost about twenty dollars for a million tokens. By October 2024 the same capability cost…

On paper, adulthood should be arriving later than ever, and arriving in better condition than ever. Young adults today are, on average, the most schooled cohort in human history. They hold more credentials than their parents did, command more information than any generation before them, and operate tools that would have read as miracles a…