There’s this exercise in Clear and Simple as the Truth where you’re tasked to rewrite your college admissions essay in the classic style. A defining feature of this style is rather than using your words to assert, you present. I tried this with a recent application at a agtech startup.

Dear Halter,

I spend most of my leisure time uncovering mysteries where tech and the natural world intersect, which is why I’m very excited to be applying to this. 

The prospect of technology frightens and invigorates me at the same time. Considering technology, I find all the definitions point towards the same meaning: that it’s simply a better way of doing something. See how the lightbulb was better than candlelight, the car better than four legs, domestication better than hunting and gathering. We humans, especially since the Enlightenment of the 17th century, have been constantly seeking the better way.

Computation was the way we leveraged machines to elevate our minds. In Aristotle’s De Anima, he organised living things into a nested hierarchy, showing that it is our minds that separates us from all other organisms. Computation supercharged the mind by multiplying its memory, speed, and processing power by an order of magnitude. And ever since the theoretical Analytical Engine of the 19th century to present day, compute has exponentially increased in tandem with an exponentially decreasing cost. Allowing sci-fi fantasies of just 20 years ago, to become reality.

Today, we live in an age unlike any of our ancestors (presumably). The power of computation has proven uncontainable, like the quiet march of mycelium threading through soil, it has permeated through the fabric of our existence. This convergence of technologies has turned fiction into fact, thoughts into existence, and the imagined into reality. Consider the meeting of computation, robotics, agriculture, and ecology merging to enable large scale automated food forests, with a kaleidoscope of species photosynthesing at their maximum potential, delivering delicious nutrient dense food at scale. Or how about artificial intelligence, genomics, gene editing, and molecular biology, allowing the reengineering of woolly mammoth traits into asian elephants, reintroducing large grazers back into the Arctic ecosystem, aiding with the permafrost thaw. Most interestingly, Ray Kurzweil’s singularity. Theorising a time when computation is no longer external but deeply integrated at the molecular level, unshackling our biological constraints like never before, and enabling intelligence far beyond human. This magnitude of change is hard to fathom. 

Steve Jobs once said that the computer is the bicycle of the mind; it’s more like a rocketship now. But every capacity we outsource is also a capacity we exercise less. The Spartans knew this, which is why Lycurgus outlawed the use of walls in Sparta. Spartans thought walls made men weak, as their strength is slowly sapped through comfort. Do we see parallels here in the automation of labour? Creating time through the removal of physical work, whilst our bodies atrophy. Or the automation of thought, where entire codebases can be created with a few prompts. Is this making us weak? Marshall Mcluhan sums it up by claiming technologies are extensions of the body, but an extension is simultaneously a form of self-amputation.

I think it’s abit more complicated. Our persistent quest for the better way means we inevitably find it. Eventually most farms will automate the shifting of livestock, determined by machine learning algorithms balancing the optima between disturbance and senescence. Does this amputate the farmer? No. The work is just shifted up a higher layer. Imagine farming 3.0, where our fruiting species are grown back in forests, diverse consortiums eliminating the need for chemical crutches, humanoids automating the planting, pruning, and harvesting. Fractured between the trees are open canopies, where meadows grow. Here, animals are remotely rotated between fields in response to live data, as algorithms simulate the movement of large herds fleeing from predation, optimising pasture growth and the transfer of nutrients unlike ever before. The work has been elevated to ecology, engineering, and mathematics.

I might’ve gone abit too far with this cover letter, but basically I would love to work at Halter.

Kind Regards, Aaron.

HR did not like it.