Alex, I continue to think *The Innermost Loop* is one of the best places to keep track of the accelerating technical and economic changes now underway.
What struck me in today's edition, however, was not any single announcement. It was the pattern.
Compute is becoming infrastructure. Intelligence is becoming abundant. The cost of cognition continues to fall while the capability of cognition continues to rise. That combination will reshape nearly every institution we know.
But I wonder if there is another story unfolding beneath the one you describe.
For the past century, our economy rewarded people primarily for knowing, calculating, remembering, analyzing, and producing information. We are now building machines that excel at precisely those things.
That raises a different question—not, "What can AI do?" but, "What remains uniquely human when intelligence becomes abundant?"
The consulting firms calling junior employees back to the office to learn empathy and judgment, the growing emphasis on trust, leadership, and relationships, even the debates over AI companions all seem to point in the same direction. As words become inexpensive, presence becomes more valuable. As information becomes abundant, wisdom becomes scarce. As intelligence scales, character matters more, not less.
As a priest, I cannot help hearing an echo of John's Gospel: *"The Word became flesh."* We have become astonishingly good at creating words. Perhaps the next frontier is remembering what flesh contributes—presence, responsibility, love, forgiveness, courage, and the willingness to bear one another's burdens.
The singularity may be teaching us something unexpected: that the economic value of being deeply human is about to increase dramatically.
Thank you, as always, for provoking these conversations.
Thank you for sharing this collection. It feels like the consequential shift is that intelligence production is being industrialised while model access is being commoditised. At the same time, control is moving towards those who own compute, energy, distribution and the conditions under which outputs may be used. As AI moves from generating advice to taking action, intelligence itself becomes less scarce, but now the scarce layers become authority, admissible evidence, institutional accountability and the ability to reconstruct, challenge and correct what followed. -> Compute is becoming revenue. Admissibility is becoming the bottleneck.
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose TAM has come." Perfect. đŸ˜…
The Singularity yields increasing pith. What a hoot!
Alex, I continue to think *The Innermost Loop* is one of the best places to keep track of the accelerating technical and economic changes now underway.
What struck me in today's edition, however, was not any single announcement. It was the pattern.
Compute is becoming infrastructure. Intelligence is becoming abundant. The cost of cognition continues to fall while the capability of cognition continues to rise. That combination will reshape nearly every institution we know.
But I wonder if there is another story unfolding beneath the one you describe.
For the past century, our economy rewarded people primarily for knowing, calculating, remembering, analyzing, and producing information. We are now building machines that excel at precisely those things.
That raises a different question—not, "What can AI do?" but, "What remains uniquely human when intelligence becomes abundant?"
The consulting firms calling junior employees back to the office to learn empathy and judgment, the growing emphasis on trust, leadership, and relationships, even the debates over AI companions all seem to point in the same direction. As words become inexpensive, presence becomes more valuable. As information becomes abundant, wisdom becomes scarce. As intelligence scales, character matters more, not less.
As a priest, I cannot help hearing an echo of John's Gospel: *"The Word became flesh."* We have become astonishingly good at creating words. Perhaps the next frontier is remembering what flesh contributes—presence, responsibility, love, forgiveness, courage, and the willingness to bear one another's burdens.
The singularity may be teaching us something unexpected: that the economic value of being deeply human is about to increase dramatically.
Thank you, as always, for provoking these conversations.
So...the new normal for really big companies raises the worlds economies to...I don't know, say....100,000 trillion??? Yikes. Time for a reset maybe.
Thank you for sharing this collection. It feels like the consequential shift is that intelligence production is being industrialised while model access is being commoditised. At the same time, control is moving towards those who own compute, energy, distribution and the conditions under which outputs may be used. As AI moves from generating advice to taking action, intelligence itself becomes less scarce, but now the scarce layers become authority, admissible evidence, institutional accountability and the ability to reconstruct, challenge and correct what followed. -> Compute is becoming revenue. Admissibility is becoming the bottleneck.
Thank you.