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Published Christmas Day
I watched Pluribus recently, and the idea has been quietly stalking me ever since. The show imagines a superhuman race endowed with infinite knowledge and perfect cooperation. No individuality. No hierarchy of skill. No one stands out, because no one can. There’s no schadenfreude—failure doesn’t exist. There’s no long educational climb, no apprenticeship, no grinding effort to elevate oneself above the rest. Everyone knows everything. Everyone performs equally well.
It’s an orderly world. Efficient. Bloodless.
What struck me wasn’t the absence of conflict—it was the absence of accomplishment. If distinction disappears, what does it mean to achieve anything at all?
That thought followed me straight into our own present moment.
The Great Leveling
We are already living through a quieter version of Pluribus. Recall—once a badge of intelligence—has been demoted to a parlor trick. Sports trivia, historical dates, obscure facts: once markers of expertise, now solvable in seconds by a glowing rectangle in your pocket. You don’t need to know anymore; you just need to search.
And writing—my particular arena—has become the most unsettling test case.
You write a rough draft. It’s honest. Thoughtful. Maybe even good. Then curiosity (or temptation) intervenes. You ask an AI to revise it.
What comes back is cleaner. Sharper. Better structured. The prose you meant to write.
You shrug—not because it failed, but because it succeeded.
So whose work is it now?
Confession Time
The version you are reading was edited—significantly—by ChatGPT. I wrote the draft. I shaped the ideas. But the clarity, the flow, the tightening of loose bolts? That was machine-assisted.
Is that cheating? Is it collaboration? Is it no different from spellcheck, or fundamentally different because the tool now competes with the craftsman?
I don’t have a clean answer. Only an honest one: pretending this isn’t happening feels more dishonest than acknowledging it outright.
Christmas, Santa, and the Algorithm
And since this is Christmas Day, it feels appropriate to bring Santa into the discussion.
For centuries, Santa Claus has run the most ambitious surveillance-based performance-evaluation system in history. Naughty. Nice. Binary. Efficient. Judgment rendered annually, with toys as incentives and coal as penalties.
But imagine Santa with AI.
No more vague moral assessments. No secondhand elf reports. Just a comprehensive dataset: search histories, impulse buys, tone of emails, patience in traffic, comment-section behavior. Naughty and Nice reduced to an algorithmic score.
Santa outsourced.
If that sounds unsettling, it should. Yet it mirrors our larger dilemma: when judgment itself becomes automated, where does human discretion fit? When assessment is perfect, what room remains for grace, growth, or redemption?
What’s Left That’s Ours
AI can recall better than we can. Write faster. Polish endlessly. It can outperform us in domains we once believed defined intelligence and creativity.
But it didn’t decide this question was worth asking.
It didn’t feel uneasy watching Pluribus.
It didn’t wonder whether accomplishment itself is being quietly deprecated.
What remains human—for now—is judgment, taste, values, and the discomfort that comes with change. The choice of what to pursue, why it matters, and when to stop optimizing.
In a world sliding toward Pluribus, individuality may no longer come from knowing more—but from caring differently.
A Christmas Thought
Christmas has always been about imperfect humans trying to be a little better than they were the year before. Not optimized. Not flawless. Just better.
If AI eventually knows everything, writes everything, and judges everything—including Santa’s lists—then perhaps the last true human accomplishment will be choosing imperfection when perfection is available at the click of a button.
This post was edited by ChatGPT.
The unease behind it was not.
Merry Christmas.