Everyone is racing to build agentic research bots that summaries, synthesize, and consolidate facts into a formless blob that gathers dust on a table. The blob is pointed at during dinner parties “Look at the size of my knowledge!”
I certainly understand the appeal. I have nearly two dozen agentic harnesses in different configurations-subscribe to me here on substack and it’s a buffet of experimentation punctated by insight like this article.
Without a doubt, there is utility in AI.
But, let’s do a gut check. How many bookmarks or “saved posts” have you collected that you’ve never looked at? Your formless knowledge blob is impressive and it is wrong. Let me tell you why the blob is a problem.
Life on the edge
I post at a pretty regular clip on substack.
It’s not for you. It’s for me.
I do so for selfish ends that coincidentally has public benefit. I’ve found the art of writing about my experiments helps me with teaching others what’s possible. In a more selfish way writing helps to improve understanding of the content and what is happening-to and around me.
Knowing comes from doing when technology changes as fast as AI. I’m sure you’ve come upon that idea. “action rewards information” or similar phrases abound by various pop productivity writers. That by just being as busy as popular there’s a reward beyond money: Μῆτις “metis”.
What isn’t commonly discussed by the online influencer types is the neuroscience and chemical pathways of the brain chemistry. I won’t spook you into a conversation of woo sounding words like brain derived neutronic fluids, ion channels or dendrites. The point would be to serve one idea. That every word you have read so far or will read today, every concept or aspect of understanding that you undergo in life has one critical component: that sack of meat in your skull.
The meat, it turns out, is pretty useful. It’s my favorite magical bag of salt, fluid, and cells.
The brain allows us mere mortals to hold, form and curate ideas. It’s like an antenna that resonates experience. Have you wondered how ideas form-I mean, more seriously. All the way down to the level of individual cells in your mind. Consider the word “sun”. Reflect in your mind where the specific word “sun” exists in your mind. It’s an interesting meditation-you don’t need to read the science. Just several hours of mediation on the question of where the idea of a term that’s meaningful to you is held at inside your mind.
When you learn new information there is something magical that happens with the brain. Chemical pathways change. The mixture of salts, fluids and organisms that make up the building blocks of the mind take specific shape. So when you commit to action what happens is the squishy meat in the skull takes on a new internal shape. And that is the problem with AI.
Let’s talk about your Blobs
Look, I know if you’re reading this that you have a blob. It’s ok. I’m pretty sure we all do. I don’t mean the blob in your head. No, no. I mean the blobs on the counter. The blobs in your computer, at your job, and on your bookshelf.
It’s rare these days to have friends not doing something with AI. The conversation is some version of the following.
“Eric! Check out the size of this blob! I build this agent that summarizes all these youtube transcripts and then I put those on disk. I’ve got all these summaries now across all these videos!”
“It’s a very impressive blob.”
“I know, right!? I’m going to do another one that takes in all the social bookmarks and creates a bucket of them.”
“Oh, a second blob?”
“Yes! It’ll be huge!”
I didn’t mention my blobs. I have so many now that it reminds me of an episode of Star Trek from a century ago. In the episode the crew is inundated with little critters that replicate endlessly, but whose inherent value is questionable at best.
The Problem with Blobs
My journey into the problem with blobs began when I realized I was afraid. I’ll share with you a fear I have. It’s my Notion account. After three years amplifying the size of my blobs in Notion I have a systemic mess. It grew because I became addicted to growing the blob.
In a given day, I cover a wide range of topics both deep and broad-and if you’re reading this, you do too. We just give it a different name: scrolling.
I realized months back that despite scrolling a considerable amount of content, my brain’s retention of that information was nonexistent. I would wager this is true for you, too. Can you remember all the social media you looked at last week? Every post? The total number of comments? The weird one? The boring ones?
There’s a thought that building an agent to collect your “harvest” from all the farming of social media is the answer. This is one of the most common agentic builds. “I’m about to use Agentic AI to solve my social media problem!” Sorry to say that isn’t going to work. I’ll tell you why.
Caring about Shadows
Somewhere some months back I discovered I made the wrong turn.
It happened after I subjected myself to a particular series of Anki decks that I had no real business memorizing. I had just reached a point in my life where “now what?” was no longer the question I could sweep under the rug. At the same time, I didn’t have a solid answer about how to even answer the question. I’m a particular kind of guy: I picked up Anki decks from the shared deck catalog and started memorizing random things from across different disciples while on the cardio machine. There’s methods behind my madness.
One of the insights you’ll find online about the brain is that cardio improves it.
Exercise as a whole, but also cardio. Your brain does better when the body is in movement. I reasoned that if I used cardio and coupled that with a memorization plan I could jumpstart my brain into new patterns of thought to solve the “what’s next?” question that haunts me like a shadow attached to my feet. I thought this would solve my problem. It didn’t, but I did learn a lot about neuroscience, art, and the limitations of my own mind’s ability to recall information. I also got really good at cardio.
The wrong turn got me interested in how we learn. Not just techniques, but also brain science. What makes information stick? I can teach you a simple trick now.
Why should you care about this?
You should care about this article because I’m telling you how to rethink your relationship to AI. However, that phrase is power. Pick a topic today. And as you read and learn about the topic consistently ask yourself “Why do I care about this?” Find the emotional lever for why you care. Maybe your first pet’s death hit you especially hard. Maybe that first love? Find the anchor and in so doing discover retention.
Pause, breathe-don’t just quick read. Why do I care?
The brain is going to weight the information as more important, and find a home for it in the minestrone soup that we call our minds. I can go on and on with brain tricks. If you master your brain, you master your universe. It’s necessarily true: your experience of reality is a projection that your mind puts on. So if you master this, you can break free of your own shadows.
Brain Chemistry and AI
I titled this article “This one’s for the mind, that one’s for the machine” because information can change a machine. The Agentic AI systems grow, learn and adapt. They can learn about the content of your bookmarks, and even be a garbage bin layered with a chat interface to every topic you’ve ever found online somewhere. However, you’re coaching an Agentic AI system to grow: the information doesn’t change you.
When you send out an Agentic AI system to go summarize YouTube videos on a topic that interests you it’s falsework. There’s the illusion that you have grown. You have not. You have taken your first step to becoming a blob.
The reason is due to brain chemistry. If you offload your thinking to a machine and it surfaces up answers, then you may discover that you suddenly lack comprehension and understanding.
Look, you might not need it. But then, if you didn’t need the understanding in the first place, why did you send the Agentic AI system to go get that information? Have you really made use of your blob?
The tension is real. The implications are also profound.
What’s next
If you’ve used AI for any amount of time, then you know it’s quite trivial to offload your thinking to an AI system. In fact, if you did so with this article the agent should really challenge you: “Hey, human, I think you should actually read this one.” because now that I’ve explained how offloading your thinking doesn’t yield understanding is due to brain chemistry, then the next questions involve doing something about it.
The funny thing is that once you do, you’ll discover your AI skills grow considerably.
You’ll need to learn to be more intentional about what to give to the AI versus what you do yourself. It’ll be hard and you’ll make mistakes. Do you really need a blob pile of YouTube summaries or research documents? You might, but that’s a serious level of inquiry that has to be done at the level of the individual.
At the level of an organization, there’s quite a few words that could be said about the implication of having humans who only understand at a shallow level what the business is about. Many businesses get middle-managed into weakness by muddles putting their organization onto the path of maximum compartmentalization to make it as painless as possible to replace important positions. Managers just solving problems-it’s an incentives problem. However, in so doing they robbed the worker and the organization of the leveraged benefit of understanding. Businesses will be lured in on the false sense of security that Agentic AI systems “understand” the entire scope of their business, that no humans are needed. Then what’s the point of business?
It’s not easy, I get that.
The trick is identifying what information as learning should be done by us humans versus the machine. When information and tasks come in, with intention people or agents should choose to not solve the problem and hand it to a human to learn from. Allow the mistake, shape the judgment, ensure the mind achieves growth.
The question of the age might just be figuring out which one is for the mind, and which one is for the machine. It’s not about the bytes on disk, but the chemical soup in your skull.
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.