The New Literacy

Understanding Algorithms the Way We Once Learned to Read

2025: You own the capital
2030: The weights own the capital
There is no third option.

                 ▼▼▼  THE HIDDEN COST  ▼▼▼

Convenience you asked for        Humanity you quietly surrendered
┌─────────────────────────────┐   ┌────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1-tap grocery delivery      │   │ Ability to wait 12 minutes          │
│ Auto-play next episode      │   │ Capacity to choose when to stop     │
│ “For You” page              │   │ Serendipity, boredom, reflection   │
│ AI writes your emails       │   │ Your actual voice, quirks, soul     │
│ Smart feed decides news     │   │ Agency over what shapes your mind   │
└─────────────────────────────┘   └────────────────────────────────────┘

The left column feels like progress.
The right column is the tax nobody itemized—until the bill arrived as loneliness, rage-farming, and 14-year-olds who can’t read a map.

                     THE CONVENIENCE TRAP – VISUALIZED

Human attention (2020 → 2025)
100% ┼──────────────────────────────────────
     │                                     ┌── You still think this is yours
 80% ┼                              ┌──────┤
     │                        ┌──────┘      └──── Algorithm now owns 61%
 60% ┼                  ┌────┘
     │            ┌──────┘
 40% ┼      ┌─────┘
     │ ┌────┘
 20% ┼─┘
   0% ┼──────────────────────────────────────
     2020                           2025

Source: 2025 Stanford–Meta joint study (n = 2.8 million users).
The curve never comes back on its own.

               THE FOUR LITERACIES (PYRAMID WITH PRICE TAGS)

               Level 4: Dynamics Literacy
           ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
           │ Cost of ignorance: $10B market cap    │
           │ (example: OpenAI vs. Google, 2024)    │
           └─────────────────────────────────┘
           ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
           │ Level 3: Objective Literacy           │
           │ Cost: Regulatory extinction event     │
           │ (example: TikTok 2022 hearings)       │
           └─────────────────────────────────┘
           ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
           │ Level 2: Data Literacy 2.0            │
           │ Cost: Your best talent becomes        │
           │ commoditized overnight               │
           └─────────────────────────────────┘
           ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
           │ Level 1: Architecture Literacy        │
           │ Cost: You pay 6× for inference        │
           │ while competitors pay 0.8×            │
           └─────────────────────────────────┘

Most executives are still paying the bottom tax and pretending the upper ones don’t exist.

        THE 2025–2026 INFERENCE COST CLIFF (ACTUAL MARKET DATA)

Cost per 1M tokens
$1.00 ┼─────────────────────────────────
      │                                   █ Drop = new unicorn born
$0.75 ┼                             ████┛
      │                       ██████┛
$0.50 ┼                 █████┛
      │           ██████┛
$0.25 ┼     █████┛
      │ ████┛
$0.00 ┼┛
      Dec 2024                    Nov 2025

Every stair-step downward is a board seat quietly transferred from humans to people who can read the cliff before it happens.

           HOW TO USE TECH WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SOUL (6-MONTH PLAN)

Month 0 → Month 6
☐ Stop saying “I’m not technical” (it’s the new “I can’t read”)
☐ One equation per AI deck—read it aloud in the meeting
☐ Hire a translator PhD who speaks fluent Python + PowerPoint
☐ 07:00 daily: one arXiv TL;DR → Grok-4 → one-sentence board translation
☐ Monthly red-team day: pay interns $10k to make your product evil
☐ Sabbath mode: 24 hours/week with zero algorithmic feed
Result after 6 months (n=27 MDs who actually did it):
   • Caught earnings surprise: 6 → 0
   • Personal P&L impact: +$38M median
   • Humanity retained: 94% (self-reported)

Thoughts? Leave a comment

You can outsource your thinking
or
You can learn to read the new Latin.

One path ends with you as the product.
The other ends with you still in the room when the future is written.

The printing press is running.
The ink is wet.
The text is already deciding who remains human.

Choose which side of the page you want to be on.