came across some wise words from tyler the creator, one of those artists who seem like they should be someone im aware of but who i know nothing about. not even opposed to the genre (indie hip hop / pop?) just was too preoccupied listening to all the music i found in 2025 and added to my deep pop playlist. playlists are funny, they let you save all the random tracks you discover, but you kind of need to have guardrails for what you add or they’ll get out of hand and become less listenable.

SPEAKING OF GUARDRAILS
the words of tyler are ‘create like a child, edit like a scientist, which struck me immediately as useful. they encapsulate something thats been growing on me the last few decades, the feeling that i need to make some slight, intentional tweaks to my process.

i think my own version of this idea, and one i want to put into practice, well, now, is ‘setup like a parent, create like a child, edit like a scientist.’

you see, the best success ive felt (“had” seems excessive) creatively has come when i have done things like write out what a song will sound like in words before starting on it, or formulating what an experience will be like before starting a project, or writing down what needs doing for my game in advance of jumping into the engine to fix/make things.

what mostly happens, though, is something less ideal.

for example, i might open the music software, ignore all previously created 4 bar files, play around a bit, find some great sounds and layer them together with a beat i love, close the software - only to repeat the process a week later and get no closer to my goals which dont exist because im scared shitless of defining them.

having parent mode is something i drastically need and struggle with. i guess its related to issues in executive function. i’ve rarely engaged it successfully, but the examples of success above came from coming close to being my own parent.

the funny thing is, im 46, still learning basic lessons no one thought to teach me. i mean there’s gotta be a higher proportion of creatives with ADHD than in the general population right? you’d think these things would be transferred like tribal wisdom from old to new. i feel like it should be the responsibility of established creatives to tell young ones that they will need to work on being their own parent. or perhaps the ones that make it to middle age with their ‘creative’ identity intact aren’t the ADHDers, they’re the ones with ample motivation and balanced brain chemistry. the ones like me are struggling in JB Hifi, hospitals or minimum wage careers, having given up their creative aspirations to consumption, friends, booze, whatever. i dont know - that would explain it. i have no idea.

the parent would be responsible for setting up the arena of play: the boundaries. with a roughly described outcome, or an initial idea ripe with latent energy throbbing in the frontal lobe, calmness must prevail and the concept must be mapped out in its most basic form. the ground for its creation must be prepared: what is needed? what instruments should be loaded? what would allow for fast experimentation and iteration? how will the play be recorded so that it isn’t lost and can be reassembled by the scientist?

the scientist is the editor - the one who makes sense of the cuts of a movie and injects his taste to ensure it feels right - the one who cuts low frequences from a synth because they aren’t essential to the sound and will just muddy the mix with inaudible noise - the one who picks up last weeks painting and suddenly knows what it should become.

aside from not having a parent, ive always struggled to separate the role of child and scientist. It’s always felt great to me to use both at the same time. i can say that i dont even like the child phase - it’s not what i gravitate to. im actually jealous of creatives who can experience the joy of the process. im always rushing to the end.

i’ll produce music as i go - it’s got to sound right.
i’ll quickly move from splashing paint onto a canvas to creating detailed shapes. i like ‘having made a painting’ more than painting.

game dev is where it comes closest to working: it’s technical, and creates something interactive not passively consumed. the play is in the making and testing cycle,. testing is playing. but now that i think of it, my game is a mess of loose logic and bugs - the way i approached the making phase did have a lot of playing. ok im not sure at this point how this metaphor applies to game dev (sorry!). delete this paragraph from your mind (leaving it in cos someone might be able to explain it to me). in any case, although it is creative, it’s obviously a bit different. as an afterthought, making music also can be a bit technical, whereas painting is less so.

ok, speaking of delineation, im beginning to understand… some forms of creativity naturally separate the phases better.

photography for example is pretty delineated: the parent sets up the camera, with its settings and exposure; the child looks at the world and finds the light and color; the scientist tweaks and finishes the photo on the computer.

music, as i have been doing it (on the computer, one part at a time) is a bit different. the parent might have intentions (usually not to be honest); the child gets to tinker with different sounds and meoldies; the scientist arranges a track and makes the sounds work together. but the delineation is not forced: the child can become the scientist the moment they think a sound would be better with a different filter, and starts playing around with the subtleties. there’s more back and forth. i think what happens here is that the overall creation is limited because there’s less spontaneity, there’s a break in the flow and less jiving around. the vibes dont come as easily from an evolving whole, they come from the parts bit by bit.

ill attempt to fit this metaphor to game dev although im currently pondering whether that field is really creative at all. my own definition of creativity is making something that doesnt yet exist, so in that sense yeah it’s a creative endeavour. but in this ive also highlighted something to myself: do we culturally think of what the child does when we think of creativity? is it a loaded term that ignores the work of the parent and scientist? is this why painting or making a song on guitar are clearly creative but game dev isn’t - because it’s less like play and more technical? even when these other roles are essential to bringing forth the new and without it we’d just be, well, playing? hrm. does trying to fit the identity of ‘a creative’ thus limit me, because i feel deficient at the play part, the part my identity should hinge on according to a loaded word i inherited?

well i honestly think that’s enough for now. i will check in later with some results. Ava has a song that was spontaneously invented this morning, and ill spend some time trying to be a parent and set intentions for what he’d like it to become, how we’ll capture it, where it could go. it’ll be helpful because in this example, i get to be the parent for the most part and can leave the playing to someone else.

i also kind of wonder if im just reinventing the wheel here, and am patently unable to learn things externally and have to reinvent every concept for myself in order to move forward.

did you enjoy this stream of consciousness? i enjoyed writing it: piecing together thoughts that occurred to me over weeks, months and years, on the fly. let me know with a like if you made it this far. there are seven people on this list, i’ll settle for three thumbs up.

heys

just checking in to summarise some research into the questions from last time. It is kind of a brain dump, and i did literally just want to get it out of my head and move on.

I’ve uncovered two main issues:

• the near-term threat to our own agency via cognitive offloading to generative ai.

• the media-term threat to our sovereignty posted by at ai agents.

My research proposal goes into this a little and if you’re curious there are readings attached.

the future feels very volatile. Not that it ever wouldn’t be i guess. Looking into the future to create the best version of it is hard because uncertainty is pretty high.

It looks like the following situations might play out

• Scarce computing resources mean limited compute power, meaning it will go to who can afford it, which will be the mega corporations like google, nvidia and apple. They will conglomerate and control the hardware and continue to rent cloud access to their models via tokens. Their customers will be the organisations, governments and companies.

• An underground movement for AI compute will rise alongside this, where increasingly rare and valuable consumer compute power will be pooled via distributed networks which people can contribute to and access for ai compute. This will help democratise access, and while it already exists for nerds, will be made accessible.

• In any case access will be controlled by $$$ or hardware contribution.

• Access will not be universal. Current generative LLM AI that people are using to code (and as glorified google searching) is run at a loss, and is barely scalable to society-wide use cases. Efficiencies in AI software might alleviate this over the near-term, but it feels likely that demand will stay ahead of supply creating have and have nots.

• The have nots are not necessarily disadvantaged: It will become increasingly apparent that AI compute while useful for many rote and routine tasks, does not solve the problem of knowing WHAT to do and WHY. AI will empower people to do whatever they want, and it might assist them in decision making, but it will never replace the intuition and

• That said, people will become increasingly good at discerning what is slop. While ai threatens some cognitive powers, we will develop others: heightened sensitivity to intent and purpose. We’ll increasingly value succinct, clear and meaningful communication. It could be that everyone learns this in different ways.

• What it means to create and consume will change, as ai generated/supported content continues to flood our feeds. What we can see and hear will no longer impress us and meaning will cut through noise.

AI will certainly affect the white collar job market - jobs that have no real creative input will be outsourced to AI. I think this is a great thing for civilisation as a whole - even for the people who are displaced if it’s managed well.

That’s the near-future, let’s say 10 years. AGI might come about during that time, although I think it would have to be based on entirely different computing and software paradigms than current generative models. It would certainly not be universally available and the it’s pretty hard to even guess at the future beyond this let alone prepare for it. The same basic issues will exist and be multiplied I guess.

Ultimately useful as AI output might be, it was not earned through error, therefore whether it is truth or not is almost irrelevant when it comes to human understanding. Ideally, no matter the level of intelligence, we will use it to fulfil the most meaningless and basic of human needs. In the long term, hopefully we will all fully engage in higher order pursuits being unafraid to fail, with less mortal fear, better societal safety nets. AI will support our efforts while we remain in control, like a person in a mech suit.

How does all that relate to my life?

I was considering applying to postgrad research to help map and create the future, but I won’t be studying this as I’ve seen that it’s already being done, and the opportunities around my city feel a little restrictive. Here’s the proposal (again) I was working on.

I’ve decided to keep using AI to code my projects, but not to worry about losing access. As mentioned, knowing what to do is the real bottleneck. AI will just help get things done faster. I’ll use it where i can/need and not let it control me. I’ll dabble where it suits me and where i can without investing too heavily on it. I don’t think it’s the “curve to get ahead of” that people are saying it is, i think the curve to get ahead of is my intentions and how i back them up.

I’m continuing to feel out my future and have decided to give myself a little leeway while I follow my joy (while of course constantly asking how this can be effectively monetised).

Life update: met someone who likes me for who i am and doesn’t want me to change. surreal. They’re smart, hardworking and fun to be around as well as considerate and supportive, I really don’t know what the fuck is going on.

Heyas, thanks for tuning in again. Last time I mentioned exploring the intersection of creativity and technology with more intention. I’m replacing more of my downtime with this, and that direction is coming together nicely.

An article by Abi Awomosu recently put me on a train of thought: important questions about AI are not at the forefront of discussion. The debate is generally extreme—either apocalyptic or techno-solutionist. Both are valid, but large humanistic concerns in the middle need exploring, centered around how AI will change... well... us. I’m working on a research proposal to address this, which I’ll introduce here.

My questions for the near future start with cognitive offloading—outsourcing parts of our mental processes to external tools. The result is losing internal capability, something documented to happen quickly with LLM use, and something I have felt keenly when using AI to organize thoughts.

"This cognitive offloading from human to AI is especially risky for novice learners who are building foundational knowledge and skills... [they] create 'false mastery' with potentially long-term consequences... The unstructured use of AI risks even wider equity divides, as students lacking metacognitive skills are more susceptible to harmful offloading." — Australian Policy Observatory (APO) Report on Educational Offloading (2026)

"While students frequently claim Generative AI enhances their critical thinking, recent research warns of skill atrophy and metacognitive laziness... Approximately half of the cohort believes AI acts as an intellectual partner, but they actually fall into an efficiency trap, bypassing foundational learning and abandoning metacognitive self-regulation. We define this state as Epistemic Confinement, where students experience an illusion of competence, feeling as though they are thinking independently while operating entirely within AI-constructed analytical boundaries." — Dr. Winn Wing-Yiu Chow, et al., University of Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education (2025)

Interestingly, I don’t believe specific mental processes need protecting just because they are “innate.” Human babies are neurologically underdeveloped, leading to experience-dependent plasticity; things we assume are natural could just be requirements of the age. Socrates feared writing would affect memory; the calculator externalized basic maths, but we do more with it now. There is no defined point where cognitive offloading is inherently bad. The world changes and so do we, usually moving into a higher order at some small perceived expense.

What concerns me about cognitive offloading is not losing this environmental wiring. Change is constant. The issue is giving huge power to private entities with their own interests and agendas.

It’s obvious with Google search; it returns results that maximize its revenue. We still have the agency of choice, essentially just skipping a research step. But LLMs take it to a new level by outsourcing logic and information synthesis. We save time, but there’s a lot of iceberg under the water in terms of assumed ideologies. Capitalism is fine to a point, but I wouldn’t let a company take over my mental processes. Companies will throw duty of care out the window for a few bucks—just look at how the YouTube algorithm can convince an otherwise mildly curious person their boss is an alien. We are already placing too much trust in digital processes and outsourcing our opinions.

And the above only relates to generative AI. Soon, we’ll have agentic AI. Instead of just a tool, it will act as a partner requiring complete access to our lives to run things, coach us, and infer our desires. It will still be owned by private entities. As companies and nations scramble to implement AGI and ASI, we will offload internal processes in massive chunks, leaving us in completely unknown territory.

"AI agents will become the primary way we interact with computers in the future. They will be able to understand our needs and preferences, and proactively help us with tasks and decision making." — Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft)

At this point, you’re probably thinking: Exception bias much? Don’t you build AI tools? Yes. I’m actually building a ‘Brain’ for myself—a second-brain tool to externalize my research and projects. I can add media or text and have them automatically summarized. It has basic Gemini AI built in to help with link building, and I can chat with entries for quick info access. (Try it) . You’ll need a local file, best in Chrome).

Am I scared of this AI future? I’m cautious as fuck. But as someone with less cognitive power for synthesizing information than the people around him, I am so keen for AI systems that can help control the mess in my head. My early experiments writing with AI were tantalizing but frustrating. They made my thoughts clearer, but not in my voice—which was unacceptable. I realized I’d been waiting my whole life for AI, but have to work out how to use it to add to my process, not stymie my potential. So I’m experimenting and trying to be conscious of what I’m giving up. Yes, this is hypocritical and muddy as hell.

Because of this messiness, I want to inject intentionality into our use of these powerful potentials. We have to work out exactly what internal processes we need to retain to manage the automation. This requires design. Future education won’t just react to economic demands; it must proactively support important cognitive processes—which we currently don’t even know.

That might sound authoritarian. We’ll need to avoid a future where such things are dictated. But because of our plasticity, we are designed by our environment regardless. We need to know what we want to be and what we don’t want to become because the stakes are higher now.

So many questions need asking, and assumed ideological positions unpacked. I hope to explore this using design fictions and futures techniques like backcasting. Ultimately, I want to make something practical to contribute to human flourishing—because letting the market decide our cognitive future just doesn’t feel ideal.

Do I need to worry about this? I’m currently forming questions more than answers so now’s the time to let me know what you think. Let me know what I’m missing or what you see that I don’t.

_____

PS An early draft of my post got run though the ‘bias check’ tool in my Brain app. This is what it returned, which was helpful. This is one example of a use for ai: to encourage and maintain critical thinking.

I love how i can clearly see where my own thinking departs from consensus - it helps me ask where i might be wrong, or where i am simply unique.

✨ Bias & Tone Analysis

Analysis of “The world will be different and so will we.”

This note serves as a personal manifesto regarding the intersection of artificial intelligence, human cognitive sovereignty, and corporate influence. Below is a critical analysis of its rhetoric and structural composition.

1. Author Bias

• Techno-Realist Skepticism: The author positions themselves as a moderate voice between “apocalyptic” and “techno-solutionist” extremes. However, the bias leans toward humanist-centric apprehension, prioritizing the preservation of individual autonomy against the encroachment of corporate interests.

• Libertarian-Adjacent Pragmatism: The author expresses a transactional view of capitalism (”Capitalism is fine to a point”), but couples this with a deep distrust of centralized private power (Google, AI developers). This suggests a preference for individual agency and self-sufficiency over institutional oversight.

• Constructivist Philosophy: The author rejects “innate” human nature, favoring a model of the human as a “blank slate” and “malleable.” This philosophical bias informs their conclusion that human cognition must be “designed” rather than protected as a natural right.

2. Underlying Emotional Tone

• Urgency and Anxiety: The note carries a persistent undercurrent of urgency, particularly when discussing “agentic AI” and the “arms race.” The mention of “guaranteed chaos” reflects a sense of foreboding.

• Intellectual Optimism: Despite the apprehension, there is an underlying sense of confidence in human capacity for intentionality. The author views themselves as an active participant—building their own “Brain” tool—suggesting a proactive rather than purely reactive mindset.

• Detached Analytical: The tone is clinical and observational, attempting to intellectualize emotional concerns regarding the loss of cognitive faculty.

3. Unverified and Sweeping Claims

The text contains several assertions that are presented as self-evident facts but lack empirical support or consensus:

• The “Blank Slate” Assertion: The claim that humans are born as a “blank slate” to a degree that separates us from animals is a highly contentious position in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, which generally acknowledge significant genetic predispositions and innate biological architectures.

• The Definition of “Important” Processes: The author argues we must “intentionally design the human being” to maintain “important” processes, but fails to define what these processes are or how one would objectively categorize them without imposing a specific ideological framework.

• “Guaranteed Chaos”: The assertion that the progression to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) results in “guaranteed chaos” is speculative. While this is a common trope in AI safety literature, it is a projected outcome, not a verified eventuality.

• Generalization of Human Evolution: The claim that “Lots of things we assume humans are naturally good could just be requirements of the age” is a sweeping sociological claim that minimizes the role of biological evolution in human behavior.

• Predictive Certainty: The author treats the arrival of “agentic AI” and its eventual merger with ASI as a linear, inevitable progression, ignoring significant technical, regulatory, or hardware limitations that may hinder such rapid development.

4. Rhetorical Contradiction

There is a notable tension between the author’s fear of cognitive offloading and their promotion of their own “Brain” tool. While they warn that outsourcing mental processes leads to a loss of internal capability, they advocate for a system that “automatically” summarizes and categorizes information for the user, effectively participating in the very process of cognitive offloading they critique. This suggests an “exception bias,” where the author views their own tools as empowering but institutional tools as exploitative.

real life has nothing to report except to say that despite a few bumps and humps (read into that what you will) things are going great.

what’s more exciting to me at the moment, and the reason CLS is starting fresh is that after a whole year and six months of internal searching and external floundering, I’m narrowing in on at least the VIBE of what I want to be doing. It’s ambitious and stupidly unrealistic but those are my middle names so it should be fine. What is really important is the focus: i need to keep narrowing into something so that I can see a path and then go for it.

my brain is pretty mushy so ill be warming it up. but let me summarise what led me to this point for posterity, starting with me in a full time retail job (still have this job) a year and a half ago, suddenly realising that my light was dimming and I wasn’t using any of my real potential, a result of using all my energy scrambling to keep up with all these job things I am naturally terrible at.

I took some leave and spent a good few weeks trying to analyse myself and make some videos, thinking I was going to be a YouTuber. the videos didn’t take off but i did discover some things about my personality and what setbacks i faced internally. how could i overcome the shit things about me while capitalising on the good things about me? what should I do next? where will I thrive? none of it was obvious. i explored the potential of generative ai to help with understanding myself, which turned out to be limited but a good start. i discovered this potential of ai by trying to automate the “discovery” step of a design process with a chatbot, and realised the similarities between what holds brands back to what holds people back: internal narratives and self-perception. I explored cognitive behavioural therapy (anecdotally) and psych concepts like growth mindset, and began to identify my own stories and created strategies for rewriting them.

I didnt get too far… or actually thinking about this now… did what was to follow help me reset my narratives? yeah I think so, along with everything else it reset.

some big changes in my life got set in motion and all that introspection got put on pause. i took some good understanding away and clarified the issue: picking a direction to put my best efforts towards. at 45 i didn’t want to start the wrong thing, and the major life changes happening around me prevented me from thinking about it with any certainty. but for almost a year I was unable to progress towards any clear direction or recovery of my creative, curious spark.

but now that my fate is more or less sealed and the door the past officially closed, with real options heading my way that will enable more choice than I’ve had, ever, i feel energised to begin planning my future. at the moment i’m committed to finding the direction: the field; the problem. the thing my brain, mind and experience, as well as desires for myself and this world - sets me up to thrive at.

Other people may not believe in my potential and that’s fine, because despite evidence to the contrary, i am still fully convinced i have something amazing to offer this world and can contribute to the important problems in a way that is fulfilling and also celebrated. it’s not because i’m the smartest or the most anything, i don’t even know why I’m so convinced. I’m only mentioning it because part of what I want to see in the world is more support for people, young and old, to escape cycles of doubt and to find and develop their thing. i want it to be possible and normal for people to wake up and say ‘fuck this, i am more and i want more.’

CLS stood for creative lost souls. I’m keeping the substack at the same address (old posts are gone - fresh start) but repurposing the initials. “C.L.S” is now a creative constraint (it’s actually a very tight one despite ‘creative’ being obvious) and I’ll play with the title until it fits. It’s fine for now because I don’t know what this is yet. But Lynx are sharp and agile and chill seems like a nice word to balance that. And studio means I’m cooking.

i will be primarily using this space- and i intend to fill it up with not only updates but also context about what i’m learning about as i start to get the gears moving again upstairs. Less ramble I promise.

And as a hint as to what I want to be doing, i want to move to the forefront of the intersection of creativity and technology in some domain or other. Well, a humanist domain.

As one example under consideration, i feel like ai is important and there is a severe lack of accessible, usable ways for people to use it as more than a glrorified search bar. The capabilities are bottlenecked by the interfaces - still feeling to be designed by engineers (unusable or not useful).

I’m still reseaching the future landscape and opportunities for someone like me.

And just to add some value to this first post, I’d like to talk briefy about this amzing peice i read on substack last night. It was insightful and comprehensive, even though it was clearly crafted from an ideological and one-sided. It was hugely useful in that it did identify several hard-to pinoint dangers with AI, positioning it as a new tool of value extraction for what it termed “empire.” Yes it had elements of victim culture, but you know what, everything is relevant and deserves consideration. This piece reveals how AI might target subconscious processes to not just shape preferences, but co-opts our imagination to redefine reality. Anyway I feel like that’s a good enough intro give it a go if you’re brave and feeling openen minded (yes you will need both).

So that was rambly but kind of necessary - i dunno as usual im just oragnising and recording my thoughts in realtime to delineate a change and propel myself to movement.