“I Don’t Need to Learn Anything Anymore”

Joe's Nerdy Rants #74 - Weekend reads, podcasts, and other stuff

Idiocracy is a great movie, err, documentary

“I don’t need to learn anything anymore.”

I hear a lot of crazy stuff in public. As far as I could tell, this person thinks AI can answer any question and will soon automate everything, so there’s no point in learning anything anymore. This comment hit me pretty hard, and I’ve been reflecting on it.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve thought a lot about the nature of work, education, and living with ever-increasing automation. I grew up on dystopian 1980s and 90s cyberpunk and sci-fi, so I’m kinda weird that way. Once I had kids, it was even more at the top of my mind. Raising kids has a way of focusing your attention on the future world they’ll live in. The only thing I can guess about the future is that it will be exponentially more complex and dynamic than the world we’re in today. And in that environment, things will change a LOT. You can only continuously adapt and learn, and have transferable skills and expertise that can be used across industries or geographies. This is how I approach life and how I’m raising my kids.

One thing I noticed before the recent AI craze was an increasing superficiality and shallowness in discussions I’d have with people. People would rattle off the headlines of whatever clickbait article or social media post they glanced at, and it was clear they hadn’t thought much about the topic, whatever that might be - just regurgitating whatever conventional talking points were handed out. Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book The Shallows explained how the Internet rewires human brains. Consuming an overabundance of bite-sized Internet content like this article, Google, YouTube/TikTok, and other social media fundamentally differs from reading books or watching long movies. Your brain works differently when consuming short-form content, and it doesn’t require nearly as much attention or brainpower. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” How information is delivered is just as important as the information itself.

Another fascinating book is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, which looks into our shrinking attention spans, which have been declining for decades. As Hari writes, “We are soaked in information.” More information means less time to focus on it. And less focus impacts expertise and depth. Hari quotes Sune Lehmann, who runs the most extensive scientific study on our collective attention spans, “...what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships takes time. It takes energy. It takes long time spans. And it takes commitment. All of these things that require depth are suffering. It’s pulling us more and more onto the surface.”

Surface-level thinking is everywhere these days. Depth is rare. I meet a few people who dive deep and continually learn new things in the data and tech field. These people are a tiny group. Most people tell me they don’t have time to learn. Taking courses and reading books takes too much time. Some people are lazy. But I think for most people, the lack of time is simply due to being overwhelmed by life, and I can empathize if that’s the case. Others tell me they already know everything and further learning is pointless. These people are firmly in the “I don’t need to learn anything anymore” camp.

With the increased use of AI for everything from writing emails, vibecoding, and task automation, I’m curious about the long-term impacts on professional expertise and depth. What does it mean to be an expert if you’re outsourcing your critical thinking and work to an AI? If you don’t have sufficient depth in a field or subject, how will you know if AI provides you with the correct answers, writes high-quality and performant code, or takes the right actions?

I recently used a popular vibecoding tool to create a web app for my wife. She’s always wanted a “virtual closet” to recommend clothes based on her mood and day of the week. On the surface, the app was a passable MVP. When I looked under the hood, the code was pretty bad. Weird variable naming conventions and very inefficiently structured code. As a software engineer, I’d probably spend more time understanding the code and refactoring this mess. It would be easier to code (with or without AI) and create it from the bottom up. At least if I create the app from scratch, I know its quirks and nuances. If I add a feature, I know what it’s supposed to do and why it’s written the way it is. It might take a bit more time, but I’m not getting extra credit for cranking out shitty apps. If I didn’t have a background in software and know what to look for, I’d probably just let this pass.

I’m hearing more buzz about non-technical people using AI to create apps. This is true, and if those apps are used for individual purposes or prototypes, that’s probably fine. But as the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a prototype. Everything becomes production software. Sadly, we’re entering the era of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch of AI Slopware where we churn out endless amounts of disposable and low-quality apps. The immediate consequences will be maintenance nightmares, security risks, or erosion of user trust. The second-order effects are declining craftsmanship, expertise, and a focus on quality.

It’s not all bad, though. With the explosion of AI, expertise and depth should matter more than ever. In the right hands, AI can feel like a superpower. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I’m having more fun than ever writing code. I can build whatever crazy idea is on my mind. AI’s been a great assistant for my new business, helping me brainstorm ideas and acting as a sounding board. I’m not blindly following AI’s advice and haven’t stopped learning. I read 1-2 books weekly, read countless articles, and constantly talk with people to learn something new and challenge my ideas. AI is a fantastic complement to my work, allowing me to move faster than ever. But it’s not replacing my expertise. Instead, it's amplifying it.

That’s the big difference. If you’re competent, you know what “good” looks like. If AI does something wrong, you can nudge it along. But AI can do more harm than good in the hands of a rank amateur, especially an incompetent and overconfident person. Especially as AI agents will soon run amock in a lot of companies, we’re in a true Fuck Around and Find Out moment in time. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

In a time when it’s easier than ever to outsource nearly everything to AI, I urge you to take your profession seriously. Enjoying the struggle is what it means to grow as a professional. Invest in your skills. Read books. Push yourself to learn something difficult. Do hard stuff. Be human.

Please listen to the audio above or on Spotify (or your podcast platform of choice).

Have a wonderful weekend,

Joe

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Cool Weekend Reads

Here are some cool articles I read this week. I hope you enjoy them.

How Professional Wrestling Explains Donald Trump's Washington - POLITICO

Vibe Check: OpenAI’s o3, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science | WIRED

AMD 2.0 – New Sense of Urgency | MI450X Chance to Beat Nvidia | Nvidia’s New Moat – SemiAnalysis

A practical guide to building agents | OpenAI

PostgreSQL JSONB - Powerful Storage for Semi-Structured Data

The 2025 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI

OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry

Dario Amodei — The Urgency of Interpretability

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Podcasts

Freestyle Fridays - “I don’t need to learn anything anymore.” (Spotify)

Juan Sequeda & Jesus Barrasa - Unlocking Knowledge with Graphs (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - Wartime Data Teams (Spotify)

Tim Berglund - The Art of Developer Relations, Hardware Hacking, and More (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - Coding is Fun (Again) (Spotify)

Juhani Vanhatapio - From the Arctic Circle to AI (Spotify)

Freestyle Fridays - Shifting Left AND Right. The Data Engineering Lifecycle in 2025. - (Spotify)

Mark Freeman - Shifting Left in Data, Startup Rocket Ships, and More (Spotify)

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Simon Späti - The Art of Writing about Data Engineering (Spotify)

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