Yes, this is a shout-out to Julian Simon and The Ultimate Resource
If machines are innovative/figure out new shit, is the human mind still ultimate??
Forty-five years on, and with announcements of AI breakthroughs dominating headlines almost every week, it’s easy to be skeptical of Simon’s claim.
Yup, that's just an LLM now:
Ideas, as the science writer Matt Ridley wrote in 2010, “have sex.” In The Rational Optimist, Ridley argued that innovation is not the work of solitary geniuses but happens when human minds come together. As societies become increasingly open and specialized, more people with different expertise meet, discuss, and recombine ideas. The result is what Ridley called the “collective brain”: the knowledge spread across society that no individual holds.
"For recent AI breakthroughs, every system runs on humanity’s collective brain."
For years it was implied – simply because no alternative existed – that for ideas to have sex, both partners had to be human. If ideas no longer need two human minds to have sex, as Ridley put it, one might conclude the collective brain has found a replacement for humans altogether.
No humans needed.
...Humanity is surely better off with the additional knowledge AIs produce.
I'm very doubtful about that conclusion.
MOKYR's different types of knowledge:
- PRESCRIPTIVE: "is knowing that something works. Think Edward Jenner knowing that exposure to cowpox provides immunity against smallpox, long before anyone knew why."
- PROPOSITIONAL: "understanding why something works, such as comprehending the underlying science or natural laws."
= "Mokyr’s answer to why the Industrial Revolution did not stall like earlier golden ages is that Europe got both types of knowledge moving together."
The latest wave of AI discoveries could make one pessimistic about humanity’s role in the future of innovation. But Mokyr’s point is that the two types of knowledge should move together, and understanding why something works matters just as much as knowing that it does. Candidate proofs are not theorems, and predictions are not findings.
AIs can crunch statistical correlations, draw on what humans already know, and generate prescriptive knowledge far faster than any human mind can convert the output into something verified, trusted, and useful. That is why we need more educated minds, not fewer. The scarce resource, indeed the ultimate resource, is still us.
Very neat illustration of the sleight-of-hand involved: scarce vs ultimate (or immaculate, really).
No, we need more inquisitive and open minds. LLM's will make "education" an almost immediate outcome of those two traits.
Human minds are still paramount because that's where preferences live. LLM's have no access to our preferences, other than through observing us.
I'm kind of sympathetic to this approach (=the AE-trained intellectual in me; subjective value etc), but what on earth makes you think that that conclusion holds? Algos are pretty good at determining what I want from observing me
The point isn't about how well they can learn what you want. It's that what you want is what matters.
but that makes them good tools, no? (Because they, quite reliably, give me what I want)
They can probably do some good hedonic analysis to anticipate the best feature sets to include on existing products. I doubt there's actually a substitute for human entrepreneurial intuition, because it's rooted in the first-hand experience of being a human.
I'd say this is already evident in how much people dislike AI slop content. It can do quick information presentation tasks, but it can't create new compelling artwork or leap to interesting insights.