🍳Prompts for Breakfast, Bye Bye Social Media, Rate Cut & Synthetic Labor
AI and robotics don’t have to just replace jobs. They could reconfigure them in helpful ways.
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Smarter in 30 seconds: This Issue at a Glance
- 🍳 Prompting as Competition — The real divide isn’t AI users vs. non-users, but those who prompt well and iterate vs. those who don’t.
- 🧑💻 Partner, Not Vending Machine — Treat GenAI as a collaborator: refine drafts, reorder ideas, adjust tone, and probe for reactions.
- 📈 Skill That Compounds — Each prompt experiment sharpens thinking and accelerates value extraction; better prompts = better outcomes.
- 🏢 From Policies to Prompts — Organizations may replace dusty playbooks with living libraries of prompts; even prompt marketplaces could emerge.
- 📱 The Algorithm is sabotaging itself — Social media was supposed to thrive on outrage and AI spam but engagement is collapsing.
- 💡 Premium S3T Edge — New Quick Reference on Quantum + updated Innovation Panorama provide tap-ready insights for decision-makers.
- 💵 Rate Cuts & Labor Gaps — Easing may stoke asset inflation if labor supply stays tight; AI/automation could create “synthetic labor” and broaden gains.
[perspective]
🍳My Prompts Eat Your Prompts for Breakfast
Ok, not really. Not my prompts anyway 😄...
But prompting may be the new competition. Mind you, this is not competition between those who use GenAI and those who don't.
This is a competition between those prompt vs. who prompt well and keep learning how to prompt better. Between those who learn how to interact well with AI vs. those who just use it occasionally.
Here's what to know and put into practice both at the individual and org levels.
Individual Level - its a partner not a vending machine
Don't think of prompting as just asking for a question and getting an answer. Or ordering a white paper, or PowerPoint. Treating GPTs like vending machines misses the point.
Think of it as:
- Getting a draft version that you're going to review, evaluate and refine.
- Or taking a draft that has some things missing and you're going to ask the AI agent to add things to specific parts.
- Taking a draft where things are out of order, and re-ordering them
- Analyzing the tone or reading level of a written piece.
- Getting feedback on how certain readers might react to the wording you've chosen.
The real edge lies with those who focus on how to constantly improve their prompting, while also doing their part. Those who learn how to prompt well, iterate, and interact fluently with AI versus those who dabble occasionally.
Those who write better prompts will win.
At the individual level, prompting is a skill that compounds: every experiment teaches you how to ask better, think sharper, and extract more value.
Think back - typewriters and keyboards meant we didn't have to take the time to write letters out stroke by stroke. It didn't spell the end of human intelligence. It just meant we could produce more at the speed of conceptual thought. Dictating text now doesn't have to mean that we use our brains less....we just use them differently: instead of forming sentences word by word, we arrange thoughts and paragraphs...ordering and reordering them until we believe we've articulated the comprehensive view that the audience needs.
At the organizational level, there are some even bigger implications.
Org Level - New chapter for DAOs?
Don't be surprised if prompts start to replace traditional procedures and policies. Imagine firms where the “playbook” isn’t a dusty binder—it’s a living library of prompts employees can run, adapt, and share.
Taking this further, imagine startups that focuses on letting people or companies create and then use and schedule prompts on demand. Maybe they rent their prompts out to other people or sell them.
We may even see prompt marketplaces, where people rent, sell, or license prompts the way companies once sold software.
Entire businesses could emerge as curated collections of prompts, supervised by humans but powered almost entirely by AI. With Generative AI, the concept of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization gets a whole new lease on life.
As this ecosystem emerges, those who prompt regularly and commit to constant improvement will be the ones ready to thrive.
✅ Takeaway Action: Start a daily habit of prompting and learning how to prompt better. Keep a set of prompts that you reuse and refine over time.
📱Social Media: Getting Played by the Algorithm
The past week or so has provided plenty of reminders of two opposite worlds. No, not left and right. Online and offline.
Online its outrage, hate, civil war, etc. Offline I'm seeing people talking to each other kindly. People apologizing. Helping each other. Listening. Being patient with each other.
Maybe not always, and not perfectly. But more often than not, it's kindness. Yet this is not what we hear about. How often does the "Trending" category in social media feature day to day kindness or good work? Never.
There's a reason for this: The algorithm, fine tuned to drive "engagement." Meaning: more scrolling, more commenting, more arguing, sharing, liking. In other words, wasting the time and energy of millions of people, just to fulfill some corporate metric.
Two different worlds
James Sullivan calls this "Drowning the Real". In his excellent new essay The Last Days of Social Media Sullivan explains how AI generated spam is now making the problem of polarization even worse.
- No context, no useful information - instead social media platforms manufacture "semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing"
- No proper sense of timing - as in, is right now the best time to point out "the truth" you've been dying to tell...or is it only going to run salt in the wound and fuel more drama?
- No ability to verify the authenticity or origin of posts, videos or alleged photos. As I write this, campuses are on lockdown due to blurry photos posted to social media showing an alleged shooter on campus. At the time no one can determine what campus the photos are from, or whether the photos are AI generated.
We have to understand that what is in the best interests of social media platforms is NOT the same as what is in the best interests of people.
The Algorithm is sabotaging itself
In the attention economy only the platform owners are the only winners. Everyone else loses...time, focus, relationships and peace of mind. That's what I thought for a long time. But now - as Sullivan points out - the platforms are losing too:
"Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau"
Sullivan reminds us of the platforms that have already died or are zombies (Vine, Google+ MySpace, Tumblr etc).
In their place is coming a new generation of "opt-in micro-communities" that focus on depth and retention rather than scale and virality he says. The attention economy has exhausted its audience. If as Sullivan believes, these really are the last days of social media, as the old song says I'd feel fine about that.
Highly recommend a full read of James's Sullivan's piece - link here:
James O’Sullivan
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[macro-economics]
💵Finally a Rate Cut!
My Take on the whether this cut was right or not
As the Fed shifts toward easing, the real story here may pivot on labor supply. With immigration falling and labor force growth slowing, there is a risk that rate cuts - in these conditions - start another era of “easy money" with some additional complications beyond the inflation and the plague of overvalued startup unicorns we saw last cycle.
The specific risk now: if there continues to be lack of workers for restaurants, construction, farming (ie the diverse small businesses that relied on immigrant labor) the excess money could begin flowing into long-duration, opaque investments (private equity for 401ks, or long term bets on AI data centers, quantum compute etc) rather than broad-based hiring that drives the kind of economic boost you want from rate cuts.
That dynamic could inflate assets without solving small business labor shortages, and without materially raising people's quality of life.
One hopeful counterweight: Maybe AI and robotics don’t have to just replace jobs. They could reconfigure them in helpful ways - if we're thoughtful and intentional as change leaders.
Jobs that used to require a full-time worker might become doable as part time jobs - which could allow young unemployed workers or retired workers to rejoin the workforce. Or likewise could allow under employed part-time workers to take on another part time job to increase their income. If this kind of “synthetic labor” effect takes hold, easing could translate into real growth instead of stagflationary pressure.
The question for leaders is whether capital and policy will align to broaden these gains, or concentrate them in a narrow set of high-tech bets.
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Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.
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