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1 week ago
4
You're apartment hunting when a friend mentions a free room. Your skepticism evaporates the moment you hear the roommate's name: Albert Einstein.
The lease practically signs itself.
Day one, you hover by his door. "Professor Einstein?" He glances up from his papers "Albert, please. And yes, ask away."
At first, you rapid fire your questions: What does E=mc² really mean? The nature of time? God and dice? Albert's chalk dances across his blackboard, equations blooming like flowers.
But Tuesday's email deadline looms. "Albert, could you just... make this sound more professional?"
By week two, it's all emails. Summaries. Cover letters. The blackboard gathers dust.
Then comes the knock. Albert clears his throat, Hawking and Tao are visiting. Would $20 monthly be unreasonable?
Twenty dollars. For Einstein, Hawking, AND Tao? You hand over your credit card before he changes his mind.
The apartment transforms. Hawking's synthesizer harmonizes with Tao's rapid-fire proofs while Einstein's violin provides the soundtrack. You rotate between them like a kid in an intellectual candy store. Monday: quantum mechanics with Hawking. Tuesday: number theory with Tao. Wednesday: relativity with Einstein.
Thursday: "Hey guys, can someone make this LinkedIn post sound less desperate?"
The silence is deafening.
Friday: "Format this spreadsheet?"
Saturday: "Rewrite this Tinder bio?"
Einstein calls a house meeting. Chalk dust settles as he mentions the new rent: $200. "The time, you see..." he begins gently.
"Two hundred?" you sputter. Then pause. MIT costs sixty grand a year. This is three geniuses for the price of a gym membership. "Actually, that's totally fair."
Within hours, you're back with your most pressing research need: "Can you three analyze the optimal strategy for getting my neighbor to stop stealing my packages, incorporating game theory, quantum superposition, and relativistic time dilation? Also, make it rhyme."
Tao's eye twitches. Hawking's synthesizer emits what might be a sigh. Einstein returns to his violin.
But they start writing.
Because that's what they do now, your personal brain trust, humanity's greatest minds, crafting strongly-worded emails about missing Amazon deliveries. You settle into your chair, already composing tomorrow's request: "Make my grocery list sound more intellectual."
Somewhere in another timeline, Einstein weeps.
And here's the thing, this is us. Right now. Today.
We're living with Einstein. With Turing. With Feynman. They live in our pockets, powered by enough computational force to simulate universes, and we ask them to fix our grammar.
Recently, they got even smarter. The benchmarks went wild. Tech Twitter lost its mind. "Claude 4 solves PhD-level physics!" or “Gemini scores higher than all models on Humanity's Last Exam”
Meanwhile, in a million homes: "Make this email sound less passive-aggressive."
The gap between capability and application has never been wider. We built digital gods and use them as spell-checkers. We created minds that can one day cure cancer and ask them to write "Happy Monday!" in five different ways.
Maybe that's fine. Not everyone needs to probe the mysteries of the universe before breakfast. But every time we celebrate a new model, faster, smarter, more capable, we might ask ourselves: are we upgrading our questions, or just getting our grocery lists formatted more eloquently?
Einstein's still by the blackboard, chalk in hand, waiting.
Attention is not all you need, it’s also motivation.
What will you ask him today?
