A self-assessment · 8 questions · no signup

You’re living in two worlds. Are you adapting to the second one?

The economist Tyler Cowen puts it this way: “Thirty years from now you’ll look back and marvel — I had the privilege of living in two completely different worlds: the pre-AI world and the post-AI world.” The surprise is how little the intelligence has shown up in the data. His explanation is uncomfortable and, I think, correct.

The claim. “The quality of AI is not the bottleneck — it’s the human adoption and use of it.” Most of us only freelance with it: a memo that took four hours now takes ten minutes, and the saved time becomes leisure. Real, but shallow. The adaptation that matters is different — and rarer. This tells you where you actually sit.

The survey

Answer honestly. It scores itself, on the page, the moment you finish.

01 · Frequency
How often do you actually reach for AI in your work?
02 · Depth
When you use it, what is it mostly doing?
03 · Breadth
How many models do you keep up with?
04 · The bottleneck
A task in front of you could largely be done by AI. What happens?
05 · The freed time
The hours AI gives back — where do they actually go?
06 · Reallocation
Have you changed what you do — your role, focus, or bets — because of AI?
07 · What you’re banking on
When intelligence is cheap and everywhere, what are you investing in yourself?
08 · Posture
Your honest stance toward all of this?
Answer all eight to score.
Your result
Holdout Freelancer Integrator Reallocator

↻ Take it again

The tell isn’t whether you use AI. It’s whether you’ve changed what you do because of it.

Cowen’s own move is the whole lesson: at 64, seeing that the models could out-write him, he reallocated two-thirds of his effort away from writing and toward the things a model can’t do — talks, mentoring, being in the room. He chose his work to stay ahead of the machines, and he did it in a ten-minute window the day he first saw GPT-4.

I made a smaller version of that call. I’m an MD who stopped writing about healthcare and started shipping it — software, companies, an accountable layer that puts a named human on the work. That reallocation is my adaptation. If the result above stung a little, good — that’s the signal to move. See what I’m building →

Framework and quotations from Tyler Cowen, in conversation on the pre-AI / post-AI transition (source interview). This is a reflective self-assessment, not a validated instrument — the point is the honest look, not the number.

Blaine Warkentine, MD · blainomd.com