Neha Narula

it’s my nature to keep posts rather impersonal, so i have to work extra hard to tweet this sort of personal testimony below from time to time as i think the reminder in it around AI and the “value of human intelligence” is worth it as of the end of Oct 2026, i have not (yet - you may insist) had the *slightest* moment of questioning the impact of AI on the meaning of any of my work/skills - or even feeling any unusual shift beyond having an amazing (and rather often infuriating) tool believe it or not, but my ability to produce a completed artifact* (paper, model, open source software, lecture, …) and the effort, expertise, or time one takes to produce has actually barely reduced - despite comprehensive productivity benefits from AI the reason is that i essentially NEVER choose to work for a pre-determined outcome or some field-wide well-specified problem; i only work on artifacts i aim to perfect according to *my* judgment and where my personalized ambition obviously has no set limit and isn’t somehow pre-loaded onto AI better tools simply change the costs of my choices - i quite literally work on moving goal-posts if you will! when the fixed constraint are only time and energy, AI simply allows me to re-explore scope and make fewer (or different!!) tradeoffs or compromises, which feels almost no different! i’m not saying every job or every endeavor - including very advanced and historically prized ones! - looks like this today, but i’m offering: (1) at least one voice in this moment (of so many annoying loud FUD voices!) that it’s totally possible and i suspect extremely scalable and i predict will remain so for the foreseeable future! (2) why “someone like me” is indeed choosing happily to be in academia and not elsewhere! (again lots of FUD out here!, but where else do you have the freedom to keep seeking to create value for deciding and solving ~arbitrary ambitious/useful problems, establish credit for it, and train superstars who do the same?) my fear and worry in this moment is a lot less about Al or "the value of human intelligence" and much more about how concentration of power has a very reliable history of being very dangerous to large numbers of affected people! a VERY different problem imo *i guess certain of those took way longer than i expected but do stay tuned for a half dozen things on the short horizon…

There are many problems in our world and most of them are systemic. A pattern I’ve observed is that people go through 4 stages in how they respond to the problems they notice, gradually shifting their approach as they gain more life or work experience. I think it’s worth sharing. Stage 0 is not noticing the problem. Most people don’t notice most problems, and that’s okay. Our time and attention are limited. The key question is how we conceptualize the problems we do notice and what we do about them. Stage 1 is viewing it as a matter of individual incompetence or bad actors. This is the most intuitive, initial reaction that we tend to have. In rare cases this perception is accurate, but most big problems in society are systemic. Stage 2 is the recognition of the systemic nature. As Steve Jobs put it: “When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want.” People who notice a problem tend to eventually graduate from Stage 1 to Stage 2, but stop there — with resigned acceptance and a feeling of powerlessness. In contrast, stages 3 and 4 involve deciding to take some action despite recognizing how hard the problem is. Systemic does not mean immutable. Institutions are maintained by norms, incentives, and coordinated behavior that can sometimes be changed. Stage 3 is trying to change the system directly through activism or reform. Many junior people in a field want to be reformers. They’re in the sweet spot — when they go from outsider to insider and have a little bit of power and leverage, but they haven’t yet adapted to the system and become vested in its preservation. Media reform through collective action has happened, though nothing that successfully tackled the “networks are dumbing things down because that’s what audiences want” problem. Trying to directly change any entrenched system requires dedication for a sustained period, and even then has only a low likelihood of success. Most people decide sooner or later that that path isn’t for them. But that’s not the end of the road, because in many cases, change can happen incrementally. Stage 4 is realizing that systemic doesn’t mean universal. Systems exert pressure toward an equilibrium, but there are niches where enterprising individuals or teams can buck the trend. They can benefit — financially or reputationally — from doing things differently. In other words, when systemic failure is severe enough, the unmet demand it generates can become an opportunity. A successful exception may remain an exception, but sometimes it attracts imitators by demonstrating the feasibility of an alternative path. Coming back to television as our case study, one of the best examples of this is The Wire, a famously high-quality, cerebral and accurate show. It was not what mainstream TV economics ordinarily rewarded, but this niche was so underserved that there was an opportunity for the show to survive for many seasons on HBO. As audiences gradually shifted over time, demand for this kind of show increased in later decades, and DVDs and streaming made it much easier to cater to those audiences, The Wire became an important precedent and gained enormous cultural prestige. To be clear, Stage 4 is not always better than Stage 3. Sometimes we really need to reform or even tear down the system. But more often, we can contribute to change through leading by example, without having to sacrifice our career to pursue reform — and in fact benefit from the leadership opportunity. In my own small way, I’ve tried to put this into practice in my career. For example, early on I noticed that academic writing is often jargon-filled and unreadable. I assumed this was because there’s something wrong with the sort of people who become academics (Stage 1). Pretty soon I realized the incentives are messed up — scholars write to impress reviewers and advance their careers, more so than to inform the ultimate reader (Stage 2). Early in my career I made some feeble efforts toward changing peer review (Stage 3), but gave up pretty soon because of the obvious difficulties. My breakthrough was realizing that I should simply write papers the way I wanted to (Stage 4). Even though this resulted in a peer review penalty, when I did publish papers (or even put preprints online) their influence was amplified because more people read them. Over the years I’ve heard from many junior scholars that reading my writing helped them realize that it’s possible to have a career writing plainly. This has been incredibly gratifying to hear, and is a small but personally meaningful change — much more than I would have ever been able to accomplish by tilting my lance at the windmill of peer review.