AI & Fundamental Breakthroughs

AI will seem smarter to us than it actually is because it is able to synthesize a broader set of information than a human can.

It has been stated that one of the ways to tell if AI has reached a new level is to see if it is able to make a breakthrough in fundamental physics. Intriguing on its face — it will be cool — but…

This got me thinking about what holes in knowledge exist. Clearly there are things left to be discovered in physics, and advancing knowledge of the truth of the physical world would be significant.

But what if our general collective knowledge suffers from an information silo problem? Specifically silos around the size of what one human can realistically ingest and reference in their brain.

Take, for example, Bitcoin. There isn’t fundamentally new science beyond the clever combination of existing technologies that creates something entirely novel: trust as a new internet primitive.

In order to get Bitcoin, you needed to bring together not only expertise in computer science, but also the fields of cryptography, behavioral economics and the realities of power and chip markets.

It’s not that Bitcoin is hard to understand or that these disciplines are incomprehensible. It’s just that someone who has devoted their professional life to one of these…