058 - Navigating Complexity

The biggest life choices that every human faces, where to live, what career or serious relationship to pursue, what house to buy, and many far more nebulous concepts within the pursuit of happiness are extremely complex, majorly important, and very rare.

The rarity of these events means that humans can't rely on having enough experience or practice to make these decisions with any real accuracy, leaving people more vulnerable to exploitation.

The complexity of these decisions means that humans have to apply much more cognitive bias in pursuit of solutions to these problems, which again makes every individual that much more vulnerable to manipulation via cognitive bias.

The major importance of these events, as they impact our lives both strongly and broadly, suffers from the compounded vulnerability of rarity and complexity.

The severity of these problems also grows with scale, so while they are major problems at the level of an individual, they are monumental problems at the scale of governments and organizations, who are even more ill-prepared for the hugely increased complexity. No amount of money can be thrown at these problems to create a solution without first overcoming this core issue, though many have tried.

This is the true opportunity for the world's most advanced AI, not to be confused with the trashbot LLM technology that many have gained more recent familiarity with.

Complexity can be overcome through scalable systems with human-like thinking, as such systems can scale in ways that the human brain cannot, overcoming the human need to rely on cognitive bias to handle increasing complexity.

Rarity can be overcome by applying this scalability to robustly examine the wealth of knowledge surrounding many of these decisions, applying that sum of knowledge to better guide individuals, companies, and governments.

The world is rapidly growing more complex and interconnected, with new challenges and threats emerging alongside new opportunities in equal measure. Among existential threats, the failure to adapt to this explosive increase in complexity is one of the greatest and most urgent. Trashbot technology like LLMs offers no value in addressing this, but far better technology exists.

The catch? The technology to solve these problems is complex too, and to understand it requires a much broader knowledge base than 95%+ of "AI experts" possess. Most of those people are far too lazy (or "cognitively biased") to learn that breadth of knowledge without being required to, and that has significantly harmed the industry these past few years.

Complexity is certain to continue increasing, as will the degree of exploitation and social instability if left unchecked. The greatest invention since the emergence of language will be overcoming the Complexity versus Cognitive Bias Trade-off, and that may be achieved in a matter of months.