Challenges Posed by Next Phase of Transformation | Rathin Roy @ManthanIndia Samvaad 2025
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An excellent article about Electricity and AI.
As soon as we as investors believe that, we have created a solid framework or a process about successful investing, Market takes all turns and twists to prove that we are wrong. Concepts which might have worked in 1990(s) and 2000(s) may work or may not work today.
After every decade, market comes up with its own patterns.
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Doomprompting Is the New Doomscrolling - Anu Atluru
The new slot machines of thought â AIâs infinite scroll and the quiet outsourcing of our intention.
Doomprompting is the new doomscrolling.
The blank box of ChatGPT, Claude, or your large language model of choice staring back at you felt like a clean slate. Here was a remarkable new technology that put the worldâs knowledge at our fingertips, and all it asked of us was intention .
We would never doomscroll an LLM â right?
But even the most promising technologies have an evil twin, and the blank box of curiosity is no exception. Where social media trained us to passively consume, the dark side of AI trains us to passively âconverseâ and âcreate.â
The actions feel similar but the result emptier. We cycle through versions meant to arrive closer but end up more lost. Our prompts start thoughtful but grow shorter; the replies grow longer and more seductive. Before long, youâre not thinking deeply, if at all, but rather half-attentively negotiating with a machine that never runs out of suggestions. Have you consideredâŠ? Would you like me toâŠ? Shall I go ahead andâŠ? This slot machineâs lever is just a simple question: Continue?
The modern creator isnât overwhelmed by a blank page; theyâre overwhelmed by a bottomless one. AI gives you even more options, then appoints itself your guide. It tells you itâll save time, then proceeds to steal it while youâre happily distracted.
Doomprompting is the new doomscrolling.
Weâve entered the age of synthetic social media, where youâre always conversing with an other but with no human stakes. Dialogue has social dynamics regardless of intent. We talk about AI companions as friends, romantic partners, therapists, but even productivity-focused interactions (iterating on ideas, debugging code, editing essays) subtly socialize us through manufactured conversation patterns.
Where doomscrolling made us passive consumers, doomprompting makes us passive conversationalists and creators. The shift from consumption to participation makes the illusion far more convincing, and the addiction far more sophisticated. New technology begets new human behaviors, without exception.
Blank boxes demanding intention were markers of an accidental golden period where the friction required for real cognitive collaboration existed by default. But this was just latency between a toolâs release and its optimization. The market for mindful engagement is dwarfed by the market for frictionless consumption.
This follows the same evolution that transformed Facebook from college directory to behavioral modification empire and smartphones from communication devices to 24/7 consumption engines. Except this time, we jump straight from utility to addiction â personalization is the new network effect.
The dopamine of likes and follows is now the dopamine of felt productivity, validation, and intellectual partnership. Attention shapes everything downstream from it â what we think, create, and become. Weâre just learning to guard it from social feeds, and now weâre confronted with AI targeting both our attention and something deeper: our intention to think for ourselves.
II
AI canât do the main thing for you.
This dynamic is clear when you actually use these tools for an extended time.
To be clear: AIâs breakthroughs represent genuine, at times magical human progress. The concern isnât with AIâs capabilities but with how interfaces designed for engagement rather than deeper cognition shape our relationship with thinking itself.
For me, AI for vibe-coding and occasional serious-coding has been phenomenal (despite the typical frustrations with debugging errors, loss of context, lack of continuity, and ultimately lack of finer controls). But the question still arises: how much of whatâs vibe-coded actually sticks? For writing, I found out pretty early on that AI was most useful upstream and downstream of the main thing.
Upstream is braindumping into a chat and filtering out core ideas from noise, maybe creating an outline for a piece. Downstream is taking a draft and pressure testing it against the machine-as-critic, finding out whatâs confusing, boring, weak, etc. The messy middle is where the argument lives, and where AI is weakest.
As Balaji Srinivasan notes, AI works âmiddle-to-middle ,â leaving humans with the burden of prompting and verifying. For writing though, Iâve found AI useful only for the early middle and late middle: Humans shape the idea. AI refines it. Humans write the core thesis. AI tests it. Humans add the final touch and ship it.
Ask AI to do the main thing for you and itâll give you something that at first glance is impressive. But on second glance itâs full of clichĂ©s and borrowed ideas. It ingests your voice and spits out something else. It seems 60% good so you start editing it, only to spend your time reconciling its argument instead of your own. AI lacks what matters most: a cohesive self , and actual stakes in the outcome.
III
We sharpen the tool at the expense of our own skill.
This isnât always bad. Our ancestors invented the hammer without lamenting soft hands. But with creative work, we dull a key instrument while sharpening another.
We mistake the performance of thinking for thinking itself, the theater of problem-solving for problem-solving itself, the ritual of creation for creation itself. And the satisfaction feels real. Weâve âthoughtâ of something, âsolvedâ something, âcreatedâ something. The cruel irony is that this need for intention becomes the very mechanism of addiction; we mistake activity for agency .
The constant stream of dialogue prevents the silent reflective thinking that leads to genuine insight. Creative work needs you to be in dialogue with yourself first.
This captures the core deception perfectly â hours of âproductiveâ AI interaction that feel like work but produce no meaningful progress or learning.
Thereâs a corollary for each kind of work. For instance, writing is thinking made legible. Outsourcing it all outsources thinking itself . You get results without the cognitive muscle-building that creates them. The neural pathways you would have formed now belong to the large language models that helped you. As Paul Graham warns, weâre heading toward âa world divided into writes and write-nots."
There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who canât write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who canât write, there will just be good writers and people who canât write.
Is that so bad? Isnât it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There arenât many blacksmiths left, and it doesnât seem to be a problem.
Yes, itâs bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact thereâs a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You canât make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:
If youâre thinking without writing, you only think youâre thinking.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
Perhaps the stakes determine how much effort weâre willing to sustain â but the stakes are not always obvious. In high-risk instances within domains like medicine or law or finance, professional liability naturally pushes the system and you to preserve cognitive rigor. But in less obviously âseriousâ work â especially creative work â the stakes masquerade as low while being subtly existential.
When everyone uses AI trained on the same human output, we all drift toward the weighted average of creativity. This cognitive barbell effect is already emerging. You think youâll be the water lily that remains untouched by the dirty water, but you wonât. Because creation isnât just about output; itâs a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. The goal is to make something heavy, something with weight earned through genuine effort.
You also need to know how to do something before you know what to outsource to other people or tools. The best human-AI collaboration requires humans who could do the work themselves but choose strategic assistance at little expense to their core craft. When we outsource before developing judgment, we become dependent without ever becoming discerning. Taste is discernment expressed.
IV
We need cognitive partners, not completion engines.
Two paths emerge. For the new attention economy, AI becomes the ultimate slot machine serving up the McDonaldâs of thought instead of actual nourishment. But for those seeking craftsmanship, tools must preserve the blank boxâs promise via constraints and cognitive friction. We need true cognitive sparring partners.
Resistance requires intention and specialization. So weâre more likely to find it in opinionated, verticalized tools designed with constructive friction. Yes, designing for friction sounds antithetical to growth, but we must optimize for cognitive sweat equity over time spent (short of pharmaceutical aids to save us from our susceptibility to our own creations, until those too need intervention).
Weâll need âslow AI â that makes us do the work .
ChatGPTâs new âStudy Modeâ is a nod in this direction, with built-in instruction: DO NOT DO THE USERâS WORK FOR THEM. Or in other words, help them do the work themselves â because something valuable is learned in the process.
Speed is a drug we mistake for progress, but sometimes the shortcut is actually the long way around. Driving gets you to town faster than walking, but whatâs the goal? Sometimes the scenic route matters more than speed. Sometimes the most beautiful experiences arenât in town but in the wild, where cars canât go. Maybe walking clears your thoughts, energizes your body, and sparks creative ideas. Maybe you do want to drive, but a cute car that tops out at 60 mph, one that you know well, not necessarily the newest, fastest, or most powerful.
Ironically, current AI model rate limits accidentally serve this function. When ChatGPT hits usage caps, users are forced into reflective pauses that should really be built into interfaces by design. Netflix asks if youâre still watching when itâs on autoplay; LLMs should ask if youâre still thinking or just prompting into the abyss.
Some AI systems are explicitly trying to resist the cousin of frictionless ease: the sycophancy trap. Claudeâs Constitutional AI, for instance, follows predetermined principles rather than human feedback optimization. Itâs made to push back based on explicit values rather than instant user validation and satisfaction.
This discourse isnât anti-AI . The future isnât about avoiding AI but discovering new modes of thinking and creating with it. Some will use AI transparently for specific tasks (e.g. dictation, cleanup, pressure-testing ideas). Others will make the prompt-to-product iteration itself an art form. Weâll see new formats where AI enables novel forms of human expression while preserving proof of work . The key is intentionality: using AI to amplify human creativity, not substitute for it.
Or a simpler tool: have smart friends . Let them challenge you. Spar with them. Talk to them. Fight. The conversations that push back push you forward. Itâd be nice if technology could do this for us, but itâll always lag behind the real thing.
The contest isnât between humans and machines but between two models of human-machine interaction. One treats cognition as a commodity to be optimized for frictionless consumption. The other preserves what made that blank box special: the good struggle of human curiosity meeting its limits and pushing through.
Technology follows market demand within the limits we enforce. The real choice happens in billions of everyday moments â ours â when we decide whether to take the path of least cognitive resistance. The tension between better tools and better habits never resolves cleanly.
Each new technology asks us again: convenience or cognition?
This time, we should see the trade coming, and choose wisely.
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Investing in GOLD has changed over past few decades. Even though GOLD does not generate any revenue or adds value like Business, its usefulness in the portfolio should be considered in todayâs challenging Geo-political environment.
Though title of article sounds negative about GOLD investing, the content is quite different and it highlights why Buffetâs opinion about GOLD should be considered differently in todayâs context.
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Thanks for sharing. I went through the article, didnât convince me. Just my 2 cents.
But if we look at the above data (gold vs equities), the story flips. Over the last 10 years, gold has quietly but steadily raced ahead of equities, rewarding patient investors with over 259% returns in USD terms. In rupee terms, gold has outperformed equities even on a 15-year time frame.
This kind of logic makes Bitcoin a good investment too. These are speculations and involves some form of greater fool theory.
Modern options like Gold ETFs, Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGBs), and digital gold have made it a modern investment avenue, even in a country like India.
SGBs are dead in 2025. Digital Gold too is speculative.
A better thesis for Gold â from Ray Dalio and Indian housewives
Use it as a hedge/insurance. When Nothing works, Gold will. With this attitude, you need not worry about Gold price, because youâll never trade it unless thereâs an emergency. Keep accumulating!
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Is there any udemy or any youtube or any paid full scale financial analysis course which can help non-commerce background people to master fundamental analysis of a company and its valuation? Please reply
I think these Khan Academy courses should cover basically 90% of it. There are others as well but with this it should be good enough. I found it helpful for myself and would highly recommend it.
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Thereâs SOIC run by @Worldlywiseinvestors. I havenât taken the course, but I am told it is quite helpful by those who have taken it. You can check their YouTube channel or Spotify podcasts.
Beautifully Explained
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Gold, Bitcoin(or any other) should only be used as alternate assets to keen diversity in your portfolio. Their %age should be driven by your conviction and amount of risk you are willing to take.
There are many you tube channels. Once opted for any channel donât switch in between. stick to one learn from it then to enhance knowledge you can look at other sources as well. I am from non commerce background I personally learnt from Zerodha Varsity. App and web page based learning. Excellent. I also watch Money purse (Telugu). SOIC channel gives sector details in deep. There are many individual contributors to stocks and other details but this is what I followed. I would say I am in better position than any commerce student now.
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Mr Buffetâs final annual letter to shareholders.
Need i say more?
Edit: Not the final annual shareholder letter, but a thanksgiving letter. Heâll be continuing with these, but has stopped writing shareholder letters.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1ovsovx/michael_burry_is_shutting_down_scion_asset/
Funnily enough Michael Burry has decided to liquidate Scion Asset Management.
Speculation says itâs because of his short position that turned out wrong when the markets rallied last week.
In the filing he mentioned that his perception of value of securities has been for quite some time different than what the market currently shows.
Michael Burry has never been wrong. He has always been early. Is this the first time he is wrong? Or is this deja vu all over again?
In any case, Burry would go down as the investor with the most sigma trades in the 21st century. Shorting IT in 2000s, going long from 2003-2007, shorting the housing market in 2007, going long on Gamestop, shorting Tesla. Howâs that for a resume?
Itâs really an end of an era. Buffetâs last letter, Burryâs last public filing, etc. What a year this has been
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