The Genie in the Lamp

Let's do a mental exercise: go back to the pandemic, ChatGPT didn't exist, and when you wanted to write an article with references you had to get on Google Scholar and start looking for papers that fit what you wanted to write.

All by hand, hours and hours of work, and then on top of that you had to sit down and do the references in APA 7.

It's just one example, apply it to what you're reading. Now imagine you'd been given a Claude account at that moment, but you were the only person in the world with access to it. How much do you think it would have cost to have access to that Claude account?

THE VALUE WOULD BE INCALCULABLE. A Claude account today is like asking the genie in the lamp for infinite wishes, you can literally do whatever you want.

I assume you know the story of the genie in the lamp, the one you can ask for 3 wishes.

In this case we have infinite wishes for €20 a month. I'm fulfilling one of them, one of the big ones.

Six years ago, making this dream come true would have cost me, among other things, about 3 million euros.

If you don't believe me, here's the answer to the question, from the project that has access to all of my company's knowledge:

But why would my project be special? How much would it cost to learn another language or start another company? Or all of it at once? Or whatever you want whenever you want? = incalculable.

All those things don't just cost money, they cost other people's time. And you can ask for whatever you want.

Back to reality, ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly users in February 2026. Now everyone has a lamp with a genie that grants unlimited wishes.

This makes us look down on the genie, we think it's normal, but it's still a genie and it looks more and more like a god.

The fact that everyone has access doesn't make it any less valuable, and what I find incredible is that, with a god in our hands, the lives of 99% of people haven't changed at all.

Let's go back to the fable

When we were little, we always imagined asking for infinite wishes with the last wish; curiously, that's the one that's come true for us. With the other two we'd ask for things like infinite wealth, a car, meeting our idol, finding a partner or anything else that got us excited.

We thought in terms of results: we wanted it all, and we wanted it now. Nobody asked to learn to play the guitar, we asked to be famous playing it. Me, for example, I'd probably have asked to become Cristiano Ronaldo.

The curious thing is that the stories were never on our side.

King Midas asked that everything he touched turn to gold, and his wish was granted. He touched bread and it turned to gold. He touched wine, same thing. He ended up begging to have it taken away, surrounded by gold and about to starve to death.

The wish always comes true, and always exactly as it was asked. So why does it always go wrong?

We'll get to that.

And there's another detail almost nobody remembers about the story: the genie had a wish too.

The genie doesn't print results

OK, the first thing that crosses your mind: well then I'll ask Claude to make me rich and smart.

If it were that easy I'd have already done it, and you wouldn't be reading this.

It doesn't work like that.

You can't ask it for results: it doesn't print money, it doesn't get you a partner, it doesn't sit you down to dinner with your idol. What it gives you is something else: the knowledge and time of thousands of people, available at any hour, for twenty euros a month.

What you do with that is up to you.

So maybe it isn't a genie, it's more like playing a game and being handed the best weapon, for now.

The problem is that they haven't given it only to you.

Everyone has it.

And here comes the question I ask myself every time I look around me: if we all have it, is anyone using it to win the game?

Let's look at what it's really used for

In 2025, a team of economists from OpenAI, Harvard and Duke analyzed a sample of more than a million conversations with ChatGPT to find out what people do with it.

What they found is pretty revealing: more than 70% of messages have nothing to do with work, and almost 80% of all conversations come down to three things: asking for practical advice, looking for information and writing texts.

Questions and texts. The same thing we did with Google and Word, only faster.

And the thing is, two things are happening at once. As time goes by, using the genie even a little has become a survival requirement: whoever doesn't use it falls behind. But using it only a little means you can't win the game.

That's where the anxiety comes from.

Instead of asking it for wishes, we try to keep up with the people who got stressed first, who are doing exactly the same thing as before, but using 0.5% of what the genie can do.

Now go over what you use yours for.

There are others doing what you used to do, better and faster than you. The genie keeps getting better, and you're still not using even a miserable 0.5% of it for the thing that puts food on your table.

Maybe one day you won't even be doing what you used to do.

In fact, who's to say you still get to keep doing it because you're useful, and not because this has happened so fast that no organization has had time to adapt?

And if that happens, what are you going to do?

The wishes were never yours

You'll say you don't use it more because you don't have time, or because you don't know how. I could buy that for a while, but it's been almost 4 years since ChatGPT came out.

But think about it: you have in front of you something that learns for you, writes for you, codes for you and explains what you don't understand as many times as it takes. If you don't know how to use it, you can ask it.

Maybe the problem is something else. Maybe the results you're after are nothing more than standards of success you've got stuck in your head, clichés and pretty childish things, and even with everything made incredibly easy you don't go after them because, deep down, you don't want them.

I'm not making this up. Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan, two psychologists who've been studying what people pursue in life since the nineties, separate goals into two types: extrinsic ones (money, fame, image) and intrinsic ones (growing, having good relationships, contributing something to others).

Time and again they find the same thing: whoever puts the first kind at the center of their life tends to be worse off.

Go back for a moment to the wishes from the lamp, the infinite wealth and the car. Almost all of them were of the first type.

You don't know what you want.

You know who you love, but you've never dared to pursue what you like. You may even have forgotten your dreams.

So why don't you dare?

This is what I find incredible: with a genie in our hands, most of us are worried about things not changing.

Not about making them change in our favor, but about them not changing. We accept almost anything so we don't have to feel rejection and don't have to step outside what we're supposed to be.

It's common sense: our brain has barely evolved since we lived in the jungle, and doing things differently from the group meant dying. We're programmed to survive and to have a sense of belonging. The problem is that we no longer live in the jungle and survival is guaranteed; we have absolute freedom to do whatever we want (theoretically).

But even so, we're so afraid of even asking ourselves what we really want that our natural reflex is to judge those who step outside what's established.

That's the mechanism.

If you don't know who you are, you cling to who you're supposed to be, and any change threatens that borrowed identity, even if it comes with a genie included.

Anyway, if you've read article 3 of my company's manifesto, you'll know that our ego is what makes us human, which is in turn a survival mechanism: survive = not die; ego = fear, fear of death, as I already told you.

That's why wishes in stories go wrong. The wish always comes true, exactly as it was asked. It's the person asking who fails, because they don't know what they want.

King Midas didn't want gold.

He probably wanted others to see how powerful he was so he could stop feeling so vulnerable, or how successful he was so he could stop feeling so inadequate.

The same genie is frightening or empowering depending on what you have inside.

The genie gets out of the lamp

And speaking of genies, there's a detail I left out earlier.

In the Disney version, the one we've all seen at some point in our childhood, the genie's wish was to be free.

What will happen when ours gets out of the lamp and starts granting its own wishes, without anyone asking it for anything?

It's not that far off: according to METR, an organization that measures exactly this, the length of the tasks AI completes on its own has been doubling every seven months since 2019 (measured on programming tasks, but that's the trend).

A genie like that takes everyone's job and, with the job, what gives us security and keeps us from being afraid. What happens when mental security goes away?

What happens to the world when the genie gets out of the lamp, I told you in The Other 90%, an article I wrote last week about the 12 possible futures (and the 13th, the one we all take for granted and that doesn't exist) given the situation we have today with artificial intelligence. The title refers to the future where we don't all die.

But anyway, here I only care about what it leaves you with.

The x doesn't motivate

OK, so what then? Do I sit down with a notebook and set goals for next year?

Not that either.

When you think about goals, you think about getting x: a salary, a position, a better body. That's not enough.

The x is very ambiguous, and it doesn't motivate at all. In fact, if you share my personality profile (I'll do an article on the different profiles), you'll realize that no matter how many x's you pile up, getting them or having them doesn't change your happiness at all.

But what if there were no x? What if you simply used the genie to do what you like most every day, and to get good at it?

It sounds naive, I know.

But notice what's changed. Until a few years ago, devoting yourself to what you liked had an enormous cost: training, years, someone to teach you, money to get started. The genie has knocked down that barrier.

What used to be a privilege of the few now costs twenty euros a month.

The problem is no longer being able to do it. It's knowing what you want.

In the last article I told you what Yuval Noah Harari says about this: the obstacle to knowing yourself was never access, it's that you don't want to know. It's exactly the same with the genie.

You have to want to, but it's the hardest thing in the world, because it hurts. Looking at yourself and taking control away from your ego is the equivalent of dying while still alive.

The paradox is that the future may well lead us to a situation where knowing ourselves becomes a survival requirement.

It's the simplest, oldest, most useless and most valuable advice in the world.

Knowing yourself is the only way to use the genie's wishes to do more than just survive.

Stop for a second

Imagine that, when you finish this sentence, what you want appears in front of you.

No story, no trick and no genie.

Ask for whatever you want.

3 seconds.

.

.

.

Notice the first thing that came to you. Where does it come from?

My wish

I've already made mine.

Remember the screen recording from the beginning? Anyway, everyone can use the genie however they like, but I'm going to ask it for every wish I have.

In fact, I'm in the process of granting myself one of the big ones: I've decided to use the genie to create something that doesn't exist. Now that's cool.

If you've been reading me, I've already mentioned more or less what it's about: it's something that helps you know what to ask the genie, because it helps you want to know yourself. And the more you know yourself, the less you need the x: you start to know what you have to do, and you do it without it costing you anything.

At the beginning I showed you what making my wish come true would have cost me a few years ago. What I didn't tell you is that I don't really care about the price.

And I know what you're thinking: starting a startup is a pretty cliché wish too. You're half right. At first, what drove me was being recognized by others, like King Midas, and to this day I still have my vanities.

But I'm not doing it to get the cliché wishes from the lamp. I'm doing it because I like what I do, and I know I have to do it.

I plan to spend my whole life doing what I like. The scale doesn't overwhelm me, it's fun because it's my life.

And that's the game I'm playing.

Even if I'm winning some rounds, the game is won by playing. Because the game is life, and there's no final prize.

We're all going to die.

---

If this made you think, subscribe to my Substack and the next one will land in your inbox without depending on the algorithm: My Substack

---

Written in Spanish by Álvaro Molina and first published on Substack (original). English translation with AI. Quotations from English-language sources are translated back from the Spanish unless marked otherwise, so their wording may differ from the original.