The Progress Debt
On the 21st of May, Olympian Kristian Gkolomeev beat the 50m freestyle world record mark. He earned US $1 million for his 20.89 seconds worth of effort. His swim did not count as a world record. That’s because the Greek athlete was swimming at the launch event for the Enhanced Games. These Games are based on the idea that doping is already rife in elite sport, arguing it is more honest and safer to give athletes the freedom to choose what they do with their own bodies. And that includes using banned performance-enhancing drugs if used under medical supervision.
The Enhanced Games redefine what’s fair and natural.
Skip forward a month, and power VC firm Andreessen Horowitz announced they have invested in a startup called Cluely Inc—a company whose motto is “Cheat at Everything”.
The investment was part of a $15 million funding round. Cluely boasts on their website: “we want to cheat on everything. Sales calls. Meetings. Negotiations. If there’s a faster way to win—we’ll take it.”
Cluely redefines how we judge the merit and value of an idea.
So far the advances of AI have been bucketed under the idea of augmentation culture —where enhancement and augmentation are celebrated as part of human progress. And those advances are plain: efficiency, productivity, better ideas, the removal of error, seeing perspectives we otherwise wouldn’t, and democratising information.
But there’s a but.
But what about the cost to the natural intelligence and talent we are born with and nurture?
A recent study published in the journal Societies explores the relationship between using AI tools and critical thinking. The results were clear—the flattening of critical thinking. The more people use AI tools, the worse their measured critical thinking skills. It’s what’s called ‘cognitive offloading’. Thinking and problem-solving are delegated. The argument goes that AI is habit-forming, creating a reliance that diminishes what was once considered natural.
The Enhanced Games also uses augmentation culture to explain the games boasting, “we are pioneering a new era in athletic competition that embraces scientific advancements to push the boundaries of human performance.”
One Games’ boundary pushing is another Games’ cheating. Here, as with Cluely, it’s about the normalisation of technological and medical enhancement and artificial intervention—to such an extent that the idea of ‘pure’ idea or performance, or even genuine merit is no longer relevant to the outcome. It’s creating a new cultural norm.
There’s always a line. Well, there always was a line. The very idea of there being a line to be crossed—or to stop at—was that on one side was fair and on the other side, unfair. Or in our case, one side was productivity the other side was cheating. The line is being erased.
Maybe we should change the saying from cheaters never prosper to cheating is a rite of passage or even a ticket to entry. After all, Cluely’s co-founder, Roy Lee, is a 21-year-old who was previously kicked out of Columbia University after he created an AI tool that helped him cheat his way through Amazon’s job interview process.
Or does it even matter?
Should we even be worried about a loss of purity? It would be easy to dismiss Cluely and even the Enhanced Games as rage-bait, no different to a radio shock-jock from a different time whipping up fervor. Maybe. The thing about shock-jocks is they extract rage by tapping a real truth, change, or fear.
It’s ok to question progress and embrace it in equal measure; to be cautious and think about the cost. This is what Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel laureate in economics, is getting at when he writes with a little mayo on top, that it’s the profound potential of AI that represents one of the “gravest threats” that humanity has ever faced.
“The risk is not only (or even mainly) that superintelligent machines will someday rule over us; it is that AI will undermine our ability to learn, experiment, share knowledge, and derive meaning from our activities.”
It’s ok to ask ‘just because we can, does that mean we always should’?