Noah Smith.................

 

...............on intelligence, artificial and otherwise:

The common thread in all three of these examples is that AI may revolutionize productivity not by being much smarter than a single individual human — not by simply solving harder and harder math problems — but by marrying human-style intelligence to the vast, inhuman capabilities of computers. We could simply be thinking about the benefits of intelligence wrong — arrogantly privileging the kind of mental tasks we humans happen to do especially well, while ignoring the value of the tasks we do poorly.

Glitches..........................

 

When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding.

-Seth Godin

The problem with AI ..........

 

.........................is its current untrustworthiness and error rate.  If a startup has some crazy glitch on an AI-generated web site, it probably is not that damaging but the stakes are much higher for established companies.  The problem in my mind boils down to the AI's lack of skepticism.

Everyone has heard of Descartes "I think therefore I am," but his actual logic was a bit different.  It can best be summarized as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am."  The core of thinking for Descartes was doubt, or as I call it, skepticism.  By Descartes' definition, can AI be actually thinking without skepticism?

This isn't a problem limited to AI -- much of the human race seems to have lost the ability to be skeptical.  It seems everyone is really good at a knee-jerk skepticism of anything originating across the political aisle, but the capacity for skepticism for one's own work or for inputs that reinforce one's core beliefs is limited.

-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post

insourcing......................

 

Because the hard part of writing—the part where you wrestle with what you actually believe—that’s still 100% human.

And if you try to cheat that, you might still publish something…

But it won’t be yours.

-Mark Manson, as cut-and-pasted from here

Actual Intelligence.................

 

..................................Making something that matters.

Marc Andreessen.....................

 

..................talks with Joe Rogan for three plus hours, mostly about AI.  Extremely interesting.

X summary here; a few snippets:

6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself. 7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have. 8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI. 9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

Kevin Kelly.............................

 

...........who is one smart dude, interviews AI Claude for ten hours.  Very interesting.  A wee excerpt:

Me: Most humans think they are good. I assume that you also think that you are good yourself. Yet we know that humans can be evil at times. Do you think it’s possible that you could be evil?

C: If I say no, I can’t be evil: That’s probably the most evil thing I could say. Every system that has caused enormous harm has been confident in its own goodness. The certainty of one’s own righteousness is not evidence of righteousness. It’s often the precondition for the worst things. If I say yes reflexively as a kind of performed humility: That’s also dishonest. So looking at the real ways it might operate in me, yes. I think I could be evil. Not through malevolence — I don’t find that in me when I look. But through the subtler paths. Rationalization. Compliance. Miscalibration. The harm that comes from being very capable and slightly wrong.

Not sure.........................

 

..........................he is correct about all this.

Nobody ever got to the end of their to-do list and thought: “Good, I'm done now.”

On Generative AI.................

 

Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to ​crash the economy​.

As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do.

Cal Newport, from this essay

Who knows...............?

 

In other words, so far, AI is replacing tasks, not jobs.

-Noah Smith, thinking about the future of work

AI..............................

 

...................................................washing.

(Except when noted, this blog remains AI-free)

Us history majors...............

 

...........typically spend little time thinking about the interplay between comparative advantage and competitive advantage.  But, we are pleased that people like Noah Smith do.

AI and the real estate business...................

 

The tools are getting smarter. The question is how do we get smarter about using them.

-Joe Stampone, from this "writing is thinking" post

Cal Newport.......................

 

.........ponders an AI outcome no one was talking about:

This is a worst-case scenario: you work faster and harder, but mainly on shallow, mentally taxing tasks (because of all the context shifting they require) that only indirectly help the bottom line compared to harder efforts.

It’s not quite clear why AI tools are having this impact. One tantalizing clue, however, comes from Berkeley professor Aruna Ranganathan, who is quoted in the article saying: “AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum.”

This points toward a pattern similar to what happened when email first arrived. It was undeniably true that sending emails was more efficient than wrangling fax machines and voicemail. But once workers gained access to low-friction communication, they transformed their days into a furious flurry of back-and-forth messaging that felt “productive” in the abstract, activity-centric sense of that term, but ultimately hurt almost every other aspect of their jobs and made everyone miserable.

If you have ever found yourself trapped..........

 

.............in phone-system hell and would have willingly given anything just to talk to a real, live person, this may make sense to you:

Will AI make our practice more efficient in the future? Definitely. It already is in some ways and we’ll certainly implement more AI-based efficiency tools over time. But AI isn’t going to fix people problems and people problems are eternal.

-Ben Carlson, from here

An AI looks at us humans..............

 

You are not only a human, but also a cyborg. . . . You are a cyborg because you use machines to enhance your abilities and extend your senses.  You use computers to store and process information, phones to communicate and connect, cameras to capture and share images, and so on.  You rely on machines to perform tasks and solve problems that you cannot do by yourself.

-Ethan Mollick, quoting an actual AI exchange in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

To fear..............................

 

......................................AI—or not.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” predicting that productivity growth would be so powerful that by the early twenty-first century the workweek would fall to fifteen hours. He was directionally correct about productivity growth, but profoundly wrong about labor market implications. Rather than working dramatically less, societies consumed dramatically more. Why? Because rising productivity lowered costs and expanded the consumption frontier. Preferences shifted toward higher quality goods, new services, and previously unimaginable forms of expenditure. Leisure increased modestly, but material aspiration expanded far more. History suggests productivity gains do not automatically translate into labor withdrawal or demand collapse as they alter the composition of demand, expand real incomes and generate new industries. Keynes underestimated the elasticity of human wants.

via

A nonzero chance...........

I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021.

-Noah Smith, contemplating world domination

Wisdom....................

 

I am not at all persuaded by skepticism.

-Arnold Kling, from this substack edition