🤯Unknown Unknowns #134 - Acquired Taste
I know we’re all tired of hearing about AI, but I was thinking about AI and taste.
talks about how AI will affect skill level. AI can be a Leveler, an Escalator, or a Kingmaker. AI can raise everyone to a base level of competence, raise everyone around the same amount, or raise the ability of people who are good at using AI.In all three scenarios, Ethan assumes that AI will be beneficial, but what if AI is actually a leveler, raising the below average but also lowering the above average? You would think that wouldn’t be possible since presumably no one would use AI if it was harmful. But if AI is ubiquitous or if it’s not immediately apparent that there is a negative effect people will default to using AI without consideration.
Computers started beating chess grand masters many years ago, but centaurs (humans working with computers) would still routinely beat stand-alone computers (I’m not sure if this is true anymore after AlphaZero). Humans selecting from the possibilities generated by computers was the ideal - the humans used taste to find winning strategies.
AI is missing taste.
The more humans depend on AI, there will be less opportunities to develop taste. And humans will have less inclination to display taste.
It will be more important than ever to develop your sense of taste.
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Leaving you in peace,
Chris
It reminds me of this a little bit:
“And when Morgan reached Caltech, he did something that was very peculiar. He banned the Friden calculator – which was the computer of that age – from the biology department. Everybody else at Caltech used the Friden calculator endlessly for all kinds of statistical correlations and much else. Morgan banned it.
And they asked, “Why are you doing this?” He said, “I’m so located in life that I’m like a gold miner in 1848 who could just walk along the banks of the river and pick up enormous nuggets of gold with organized common sense. And as long as I can do this, I’m not going to use scarce resources in placer mining.”
Well, that’s the way I go at life. I think if you get the big points with organized common sense, it’s amazing the placer mining you never have to do…
But is there still enormous gain to be made with organized common sense that doesn’t require a computer? I think the answer is “yes.” Are there dangers in getting too caught up in the minutiae of using a computer so that you miss the organized common sense? There are huge dangers. There’ll always be huge dangers.
People calculate too much and think too little.”
https://fs.blog/charlie-munger-on-avoiding-computers/
Thanks for sharing these ideas, Chris.
As we’ve seen through human history: We shape our tools, and they in turn shape us — often in more ways than we recognize at the time.