Hey Friends,
It’s been a minute. I’m writing my first essay for a while. It’s a way to get back in the writing groove. I’ll be changing up the format to focus more on long form pieces with which I can have a lot more consideration to send more useful pieces of insight.
As always, I’ll be waiting for feedback as you’ve always provided. Read through, let me know what your thoughts are.
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Over the last couple of weeks, we have witnessed some of the most astounding progress on the AI front. For all the advances that have been made before, this is the first time it really is gripping the public consciousness.
Predictably, the public discourse on this technology swings gingerly between the benefits and perils. In the midst of it all, I find myself only thinking about one overaching aspect of what AI does: Everything, but faster.
I am basing “everything” in this context on the fact that, information flow is the bedrock of all we do as a civilization. Ronald Reagan described information as the oxygen of the modern age. That reasoning is more true today than in the 80’s. Whatever has had an impact on how much and how fast information flows, has had a proportionately large impact on us. The most prominent example is money. A single dollar bill carries that piece of information into every transactional and asset use case.
The modern internet shrunk the world because of how much it closed the distance every single piece of information needs to travel. I believe AI significantly increases the pace of information flow.
What has fascinated me the most about chatgpt has been how much faster it can present a lot of information compared to Google search or the likes. Doing something random like asking for 50 different words in 50 languages takes no time compared to how this process would work on google search.
Using this or a similar tool for another more productive type of search for information means hundreds of potentially productive hours saved. In aggregate, that would be a staggering boost to productivity.
Why am I focused on Information flow?
I came across a graphic in the last week about how a huge bulk of history is lost and forgotten.
They were never documented, or whatever documentation on those periods have been lost forever. It means a huge chunk of what those sets of humans learned and whatever technologies they developed are lost to time. An example is Pliny the Elder’s story about the goldsmith who first discovered Aluminum. The goldsmith was ordered executed by Emperor Tiberius. Humans did not rediscover the process for extracting aluminum, one of the cornerstones of our civilization, for another two millennia. Progress on Aluminum was halted for 2000 years because that information didn’t flow on from the goldsmith.
We owe a lot of progress to the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. To the ability for a scientist or an entrepreneur on one end of the world to be inspired into discovery by one on the other end. To the ability to share information and have a silo from which we could easily access information from past studies.
One of the things you do when writing a research paper (as I once did) is present a literature review on what has been studied on the topic. Access to this alone means a more sound understanding of what progress has been made, a higher starting point, and broadened horizons for potential progress.
Now, think about all this information flow, but faster. Shorter time aggregating significant pieces of information, shorter time finding huge chunks of important info. You’re no longer digging for gold with a shovel but with one of those blast hole drills that can plow straight into the earth.
I wonder how much more gold those 49ers would have discovered in the gold rush if they had those drills instead of handpicking and digging with shovels. I believe what AI does for information would be on a similar level. More ease aggregating, and making sense of information.
I am looking into the impact it could have by looking at the impact of other technologies that changed the world by changing the pace of information flow.
The Printing Press
The first thing to significantly change how information was aggregated and collated was the printing press. The ability to put books together has been the most significant technology in history.
Our ability to process information and utilize it is directly linked to agglomeration. Their being put together. It’s why libraries are the best places for research.
Imagine trying to read Macbeth if they were not one book. It’s a more time-consuming, intense, and overall less enjoyable process.
In fact, one of the reasons for a literature review for academic papers is the ability to agglomerate useful pieces of progress that has been made. It shortens the time for information gathering and flow and increases the pace of understanding. By doing that for several papers, you’ve saved hundreds of researchers and scientists millions of hours.
Information flow with AI has a somewhat similar agglomeration capacity. What you would have had to do over many links and some spam links, is now likely to be done in much faster time, on a single page, as a reply.
The Victorian Telegraph
While books changed the game for collating information, the telegraph cable changed the game on sharing around the world. It cut communication time across the atlantic from 4 months to mere minutes.
What it did for communication seems mundane now, but at the time, it means you did not have to wait for weeks to get useful information on global occurrences.
Real time information flow means greater efficiency. you don’t have to work, act, grow, and make decisions based on stale bits of information. There’s a reason traders and finance types stay glued to their screens for just in time information. In fact, the most valuable bit of information is one they get before anyone else. Sometimes, it’s so valuable, it’s called edge, and is illegal.
With AI, the insights from blocks of information can be provided even faster. For businesses, it could means a greater feel for operational efficiency, more resilient supply chains, and better management overall. It’s everything they want, but faster.
Internet
The internet has been the victorian telegraph on steroids. Ensuring information can criss-cross the globe several times in mere seconds.
For all the amazing premonitions on the impact on either end of AI, I believe how it changes the pace of information flow is the most significant.
Overall, as I try to listen to and read various reactions to AI development, I continue to focus on this one aspect of it that would play out over the next couple of decades. I am looking forward to it.
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Let me know what you think.
Regards.
Good to hear from you Kelvin and see the newsletter. Looking forward to your next share!