061 - Paradigm Shifts

How would you explain the benefits of language to a species that hadn't yet developed that capacity?

How would you explain electricity and all that it makes possible to a Bronze Age king?

How would you explain the internet to Marcus Aurelius, Kong Fuzi (Confucius), or Badarayana?

The short answer is that you can't really "explain" a major paradigm change. A prolonged and effortful period of learning is required for that, and often benefits greatly from immersion-based learning processes.

This is also perhaps the greatest difficulty my team faces in explaining our technology. The capacities and changes it brings are too broad, too deep, and too unexpected for realization to quickly and conveniently snap into place.

Most people require weeks or months of routine engagement to begin to truly wrap their heads around it. The more people see themselves as experts, the greater their risk of succumbing to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, misapplying confidence to a domain only loosely adjacent to their own expertise.

This is also a point where the snake oil of today's AI and the dynamics of more capable systems strongly diverge. Typical AI offers no real paradigm shift, just nudges in one direction or another. It makes a case for itself, but remains optional, as the advantages tend to come with heavy-handed trade-offs.

In contrast, language, electricity, and the internet all created paradigm shifts that offered far more than they required in return. In such shifts the transition from one to the next isn't optional, as the advantage is truly and broadly overwhelming, to such an extent as to render the previous paradigm obsolete.

The AI industry today has focused on making a faster horse, when they should have tried building something new. Like such horses, people are growing tired of cleaning up what they leave behind.