The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
-Neil Postman, 2005
thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.
But that’s physics, and physics deals with the natural. Engineering, on the other hand, is a science of the artificial , and it would be downright strange to insist that engineering artifacts have no purpose or telos.
Important point about engineering, but also something I regularly raise about how economics misunderstands itself
I think our starting hypothesis should be that behaviors that spread in the population arise from social learning, rather than from a mysterious unconscious process of thoughtless copying