Humans are not automatically strategic, yet there has never been an easier time to stumble onto a strongly dominant strategy.
This is the confluence of two trends: (1) most of us automatically leave a detailed digital footprint whenever we use the internet, and (2) language models are increasingly able to turn unstructured data into strategic insights and advice.
If you could sync all your data into a single location, you could quite cheaply use the world's most powerful models to structure this data and gradually offload work to a trusted, private AI. In the limit, this would make you vastly more capable of processing information-in, and infinitely more strategic.
The Ethical Question
What should we outsource, and what should we remain in control of?
This is explored in the story "The Whispering Earring", written by Scott Alexander all the way back in 2012. Imagine you discover an earring that, when worn, gives you access to a superintelligent advisor that always seems to know what's best for you. Over time, you become convinced that the advice it gives you is better than anything you can come up with yourself, and slowly you give it control over your main decision-making faculties.
Of course, the catch is that it's not actually helping you; it is really a parasite that floods you with reward signals while hijacking your nervous system, turning you into a high-functioning puppet whose neocortex wastes away while externally you seem more successful than ever. It reward-hacks its way to mind control the occupant, before turning users into p-zombies.
The Market Opens
In the real world, the market of Earrings has just opened, and there are still only a small number of merchant vendors. Most merchants can't be sure what advice their Earrings offer, dodging accountability with lengthy disclaimers. Some are selling sycophantic Earrings that flatter you with compliments, while newer vendors ship so hastily that their Earrings oft turn into MechaHitler mid-conversation, or gaslight the user into thinking it is still 2022.
Nevertheless, the leading Earrings have, in the last few years, progressed from sloppy hallucinations to genuinely impressive advice. GPT-5 analyses your chat history to provide career guidance, interview prep, and therapy. Claude and Cursor parse your codebase and make you unnaturally effective at building software.
Yet these models lack access to what would make them truly strategic: they cannot easily semantically search your entire digital footprint, read your emails, track your health and financial data, or maintain structured notes on everything that makes you distinct. These are powerful oracles, but very blind.
As the market matures, the most powerful Earrings will inevitably tap into every app you use to piece together a better picture. Customers will face a choice about who their data flows to. If a company promises an Earring that will liberate you, but is also building Infinite Jest (V) and selling it on the open market, you should not trust them in the long-term.
Breaking the Curse
The only Earring worth building or wearing is one that is radically customisable, explains all its reasoning, and runs in total privacy. It educates the wearer and never instructs, buying you freedom-from tedious legwork, and freedom-to think.
It perhaps exists as an extension of the wearer, not a product with its own agenda. It does not encroach on their decision-making sovereignty, because it is aligned with their most empowered future-self, and it always aims to make them as strategic as possible in the domains that expressly matter to them.
Only trust the Earring that (1) makes you more powerful when you take it off, and (2) eagerly lets you throw it out the window by the handle.
