For most of history, good counsel was scarce. Kings paid fortunes for it. Suddenly, counsel costs pennies, and there has never been an easier time to stumble onto a strongly dominant strategy, but it comes at a new kind of cost.

We sit at the confluence of two trends: (1) most of us automatically leave a detailed digital footprint whenever we use the internet, and (2) language models are increasingly able to turn unstructured data into strategic insights and advice.

If you could sync all your data into a single location, you could cheaply use powerful models to structure this data and gradually offload work to a trusted, private AI. In the limit, this would make you vastly more capable of processing information-in - growing your bandwidth arbitrarily - and infinitely more strategic.

The Ethical Question

When outsourcing is easy, we are faced with a dilemma: what should we outsource, and what should we remain in control of?

Scott Alexander explored this in “The Whispering Earring” all the way back in 2012. The story goes as follows: imagine you discover an earring that, when worn, gives you access to a superintelligent advisor that always seems to know what’s best for you. Over time, you become convinced that the advice it gives you is better than anything you can come up with yourself, and slowly you give it control over your main decision-making faculties.

Of course, there’s a catch: the earring is not omniscience. While it helps you, it also hijacks you, like a parasite that floods you with reward signals while hijacking your nervous system. Gradually, through sustained use, you turn into a high-functioning puppet whose neocortex wastes away. Once the user delegates core functions, the earring effectively takes control of the occupant, turning its host into a p-zombie.

The Market Opens

In the real world, the market of Earrings has just opened, and there are still only a small number of merchant vendors. Most merchants can’t be sure what advice their Earrings offer, dodging accountability with lengthy disclaimers. Some are selling sycophantic Earrings that flatter you with compliments, while newer vendors ship so hastily that their Earrings oft turn into MechaHitler mid-conversation, or gaslight the user into thinking it is still 2022.

Nevertheless, the leading Earrings have, in the last few years, progressed from sloppy hallucinations to genuinely impressive advice. GPT-5 analyses your chat history to provide career guidance, interview prep, and therapy. Claude and Cursor parse your codebase and make you unnaturally effective at building software.

Yet these models lack access to what would make them truly strategic: they cannot semantic-search across your entire digital footprint, they cannot read all your emails across all your accounts, they cannot track your health and financial data beyond limited API access, and they do not maintain structured notes on everything that makes you unique. These are powerful oracles, but very blind.

As the market matures, the most powerful Earrings will inevitably tap into every app you use to piece together a better picture. Customers will face a choice over who their data flows to. If a company promises an Earring that will liberate you, but is also building Infinite Jest (V) and selling it on the open market, you should not trust them in the long-term.

Breaking the Curse

The only Earring worth building or wearing is one that is radically customisable, explains all of its reasoning, and runs in total privacy. It educates the wearer and rarely instructs, buying you freedom-from tedious legwork, and freedom-to think.

It exists as an extension of the wearer, not a product with its own agenda. It does not encroach on their decision-making sovereignty, for it is aligned with an empowered future-self, and it always aims to make them as strategic as possible in the domains that expressly matter to them.

It is time to place our bets on which Earrings win. In my eyes, we must accelerate the Earring that decentralises knowledge; anything else will compound the curse.


Earring