Why Philosophy Will Matter More Than AI

My thinking has changed, evolved.

But the fundamental things that I'm interested in, the fundamentals that matter most to me remain, I wouldn't say constant, but remain organizing principles.

When you look at the innovator's hypothesis, What I was really intrigued by, and that goes back to the intro, which is the innovator's hypothesis began as, how can people create more valuable innovations? But there's sort of a mandala, virtuous cycle, flywheel effect, which is, how can people create more valuable innovations? And how would innovation create more valuable people? And so I was very interested in that virtuous cycle.

Where did it come from? So I had done some work, and again, computer science, economics.

I was very interested in rapid prototyping.

And so I was struck by the notion of, you know, Pareto, not the Pareto optimum, but the Pareto principle.

What's the 20% that gets you 80% of the way there? And that struck me as a fantastic framing for rapid prototyping.

And unfortunately or fortunately, I'm old enough that rapid prototyping was one of the things that digital design, CAD, CAE, computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering was colonizing legacy design folks.

And so we fundamentally changed the medium, the economics of the medium of design.

So how will that change the economics of rapid prototyping? That, forgive me for talking more about myself, mapped back to my very first book, which was about collaboration.

Collaboration as in Watson and Crick, Wozniak and Jobs, Wilbur and Orville Wright, What were the commonalities that made great collaborators effective collaborators? And the key insight was shared space.

Watson and Crick didn't do the X-ray crystallography.

They literally built metal models.

Wilbur and Orville built prototypes in their bike shop.

on this.

And Wozniak and Jobs say no more.

They were the homebrew.

They were the origins of homebrew computing.

So what's the nature of the shared space? As the properties of the shared space change, the quality of the collaboration changes.

Now, what was freaking obvious to everybody? Shared spaces were becoming digital.

The economics of digital thus transform the economics of collaboration.

And if you change the economics of collaboration, you change the economics of innovation.

But as they say in the old night TV ads that nobody sees anymore, but wait, there's more.

Because the legacy model of innovation, and I'm just doubling down on the innovation issue here, the legacy model of innovation was what? R&D, research and development.

But if you've got digital networks at scale, you've changed your innovation economics from R&D, research and development, to ENS.