The lease practically signs itself.

Day one, you hover by his door. "Professor Einstein?" He glances up from his papers "Albert, please. And yes, ask away."

At first, you rapid fire your questions: What does E=mc² really mean? The nature of time? God and dice? Albert's chalk dances across his blackboard, equations blooming like flowers.

But Tuesday's email deadline looms. "Albert, could you just... make this sound more professional?"

By week two, it's all emails. Summaries. Cover letters. The blackboard gathers dust.

Then comes the knock. Albert clears his throat, Hawking and Tao are visiting. Would $20 monthly be unreasonable?

Twenty dollars. For Einstein, Hawking, AND Tao? You hand over your credit card before he changes his mind.

The apartment transforms. Hawking's synthesizer harmonizes with Tao's rapid-fire proofs while Einstein's violin provides the soundtrack. You rotate between them like a kid in an intellectual candy store. Monday: quantum mechanics with Hawking. Tuesday: number theory with Tao. Wednesday: relativity with Einstein.

Thursday: "Hey guys, can someone make this LinkedIn post sound less desperate?"

The silence is deafening.

Friday: "Format this spreadsheet?"

Saturday: "Rewrite this Tinder bio?"

Einstein calls a house meeting. Chalk dust settles as he mentions the new rent: $200. "The time, you see..." he begins gently.

"Two hundred?" you sputter. Then pause. MIT costs sixty grand a year. This is three geniuses for the price of a gym membership. "Actually, that's totally fair."

Within hours, you're back with your most pressing research need: "Can you three analyze the optimal strategy for getting my neighbor to stop stealing my packages, incorporating game theory, quantum superposition, and relativistic time dilation? Also, make it rhyme."

Tao's eye twitches. Hawking's synthesizer emits what might be a sigh. Einstein returns to his violin.

But they start writing.

Because that's what they do now, your personal brain trust, humanity's greatest minds, crafting strongly-worded emails about missing Amazon deliveries. You settle into your chair, already composing tomorrow's request: "Make my grocery list sound more intellectual."

Somewhere in another timeline, Einstein weeps.

And here's the thing, this is us. Right now. Today.

We're living with Einstein. With Turing. With Feynman. They live in our pockets, powered by enough computational force to simulate universes, and we ask them to fix our grammar.

Recently, they got even smarter. The benchmarks went wild. Tech Twitter lost its mind. "Claude 4 solves PhD-level physics!" or “Gemini scores higher than all models on Humanity's Last Exam”

Meanwhile, in a million homes: "Make this email sound less passive-aggressive."

The gap between capability and application has never been wider. We built digital gods and use them as spell-checkers. We created minds that can one day cure cancer and ask them to write "Happy Monday!" in five different ways.

Maybe that's fine. Not everyone needs to probe the mysteries of the universe before breakfast. But every time we celebrate a new model, faster, smarter, more capable, we might ask ourselves: are we upgrading our questions, or just getting our grocery lists formatted more eloquently?

Einstein's still by the blackboard, chalk in hand, waiting.

Attention is not all you need, it’s also motivation.

What will you ask him today?

These are dangerous times we are living in, no matter what side of the fence you are, and we have more misinformation out there than we do (accurate)information. Though if you look throughout history, you’ll realize that if you choose any decade, those were dangerous times too. We are always in perpetually dangerous times and we somehow figure a way out of them, but this time around we have a monkey on our back, a gremlin on the airplane wing - A.I - and for all its wonders and gifts it’s given society, it’s also doing something to all of us which is dangerous, it’s taking away our critical thinking.

Be honest with yourself, how many times have you gone to ChatGPT or Claude, searched up a question and taken what it said at face value? You might even think you are clever, and ask “Are you sure?” and rely on the answer it spits out. This is not to say that the LLM’s, especially these days, is not wrong, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are delegating the most important thing to us, critical thinking, to a machine, more than we ever did before.

You might say we’ve been doing that since the advent of Google, but I disagree, with Google you have the option of a different opinion, not an amalgamated opinion of a thousand scraped websites synthesized to give you a “factual” answer.

This also isn’t the same argument as “Calculators” make us bad at math, A calculator is a tool to take my input and produce an deterministic output. Just because I can’t tell you the square root of 90210 from memory, doesn’t mean I don’t understand how to get there by doing it the hard way. It still requires me to do the critical thinking while putting numbers in, and critical thinking processing the output.

With LLM’s, I may have some critical thinking on the input, depending on the task, but I strongly believe a majority of people have no critical thinking on the output and are taking what this algorithm is spitting out as gospel and moving on, which is causing our critical thinking muscle to atrophy, and when that eventually atrophies enough, then we are all President Camacho expecting gatorade to supercharge our plants.

With the explosion of the deep research trick that the LLM’s are playing, it makes things even worse, you now have essays of “deep research” done by LLM’s where no critical thinking is required anymore, you have a so called expert doing research, and you just have to consume.

I agree that there are things that don’t need critical thinking, for example when you get a long email that could just be 2 sentences using Gemini, but that ease of use can create “laziness” and that can permeate through you, and things that do need critical thinking become jobs you end up delegating to ChatGPT.

So what’s the solution to this? Most humans take the path to least resistance, and being told by Claude what the answer is, is far better than doing the work yourself, but I challenge you to think twice, or three times about why the answer is - the way it is. Do the hard task of building those mental models, before the model leaves you mental.

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As a side note, I avoided using LLM’s at all to write this piece, and I will continue to do so, there is no need to pretend to be a great writer, when I just want to share my opinion on things that matter to me.

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