The Absurd #1: The Ledger That Doesn't Balance

Dear reader,

My last entry here was in April 2025. At the time my life had a familiar shape. I did AI alignment research in whatever hours I could find, I did the normal kind of work that pays for a life, and I held a day job as an auditor in Dubai.

I am writing again because something has happened that I do not have a good word for. So I am borrowing one from Albert Camus: absurd.

What happened in a year

In the span of about a year, and honestly in the span of a few months, I found myself in a position I never imagined I would be in.

• I am building an ERP: accounting modules, operational modules, the machinery a business runs on.¹

• I have built many apps. I am not even sure of the exact number, somewhere between ten and fifteen.²

• I wrote a research paper, and I helped with another research project.

• I am building my own company.

• I am releasing a product, Cheap Recorder, into the world.³

Any one of those would have been a respectable goal for a year. An ERP alone is the kind of project companies hire teams and consultants for, and spend years getting right.

I am not writing this to brag. I am writing it because it does not make sense, and I think the fact that it does not make sense is the most important thing about this moment.

Intelligence abundance

For all of human history, intelligence has been scarce. If you wanted something designed, written, analyzed or built, you needed a person who had spent years learning how, you needed their hours, and there were only so many hours.

That is no longer true in the way it used to be. A large part of skilled thinking work can now be asked for, at any hour, almost the way you turn on a tap. That is what I mean by intelligence abundance: skilled thinking is no longer the bottleneck it has always been.

I did not become ten times smarter in a year. I did not quietly become a senior software engineer, a systems architect and a product team all at once. What changed is that I now work alongside AI that I can call on for almost any task, and it is good enough to build real things with.

Why "absurd"

Camus described the absurd as the gap between what we expect from the world and what the world actually gives us.

Most of us carry a quiet expectation about how effort turns into results. You put in years, you get expertise. You put in a team, you get a system. You put in a budget, you get a product. The ratios were never exact, but they were stable enough to plan a life around.

As an auditor, I am trained to look at two columns and ask whether they reconcile. When I look at the past year, they do not. The effort column and the output column do not balance, and no adjusting entry explains the difference.

That is the absurdity I feel. Not that the machines are clever, but that the old arithmetic of a working life has quietly stopped adding up, and the world is carrying on as if it still does.

It cuts both ways. There is real wonder in it: things I would have filed under "someday, if I ever get a team" are now things I am doing. And there is vertigo in it: when the ground rules change this fast, it is hard to know which of your instincts still apply.

A realistic view, not a hype one

I want this series to be honest, so here is what abundance does not give you.

Abundant output is not abundant correctness. Work can look finished and still be wrong, and wrong with confidence. The auditor in me thinks the most valuable skill of this era is the oldest one in my profession: check the evidence, reconcile the numbers, do not sign off on what you have not verified. The cost of producing things has collapsed. The cost of being wrong has not.

Abundant intelligence is not abundant judgment. Deciding what is worth building, for whom, and taking responsibility when it breaks is still a human job. If anything it is now the scarce part of the work.

Not everyone is standing where I am standing. Many careers, including a good part of the one I trained for, were built on the old scarcity. I do not think it is honest to celebrate the abundance without asking what happens to the people whose work was valued precisely because it was hard to get.

What does it mean for the future?

I do not have predictions, only questions that I keep coming back to.

If one person can do what used to take a team, what is a company? What is a job?

When almost anyone can build, what becomes valuable? My guess, for now, is trust, taste, judgment and care: the things you cannot get by asking for more output.

And what happens to meaning when so much of the struggle is taken out of the making? Camus ended The Myth of Sisyphus by saying we must imagine Sisyphus happy, pushing his boulder up the hill forever. Our boulders now roll themselves a good part of the way up. What is left for us is choosing which hill, and why.

The Stoics would say this is the same lesson it always was. The tools, the pace, and the direction of the whole industry are not in my control. What I build, whether I verify it, and whether it actually helps someone are.

About this series

This is the first entry of a series I am calling The Absurd. It is not futurism. I am not predicting what the world will look like in ten years. It is a record from someone living inside the shift, written while it happens, as plainly and honestly as I can.

If you are feeling the same thing, that the ledger of your own working life has stopped balancing, I would like to hear about it.

Until the next absurdity,

Miguel