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I think the phenomena we are experiencing is "change". That's what change looks like. Out with the old, in with the new. It feels like nothing matters only because this is all happening too fast.

Since we are talking about AI, I'll bring up one thing that hasn't changed, or hasn't been solved at least by AI. Understanding. We are producing so much more than ever, yet we are not understanding the world better.

You can experiment it yourself, just because you have the world's knowledge at your fingertips doesn't make you an expert in every field. I asked an LLM to teach me everything I need to know about batteries so I can get into the business. All the information is there, a well crafted curriculum. The amount I didn't know that I didn't know before starting is depressing.

Extend this to the idea that now everyone knows everything about everything and you'll quickly realize that we still don't understand much about anything despite this powerful tool on our hand.

Understanding things still matters.



A lot of the old world's benefit was the gatekeeping of (legitimate) knowledge and understanding. You had to spend a lot of time to grok it, and you could then exploit this for money.

LLMs completely kill this gatekeeping, for good or bad. And we're seeing the after effects. I don't know how to feel about this.


So the next step is to make machines understand the things it needs to understand to solve the problems we care about.


I had this shirt that had a snarky remark on it, it said:

> I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.

The machine understanding things doesn't make us understand things. Especially when The Machine Stops™




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