Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…We have trouble wrapping our heads around the idea of writing a book for an audience of one. It’s just not what a book is to us. The funny thing is, I think we are entering a new era where that might be once again possible. It already is somewhat true, where at least half of the words I read on a given day are generated specifically for me and nobody else, because of AI. Obviously, AI is not capable of writing something which I think would be a literary masterpiece that everybody would want to read if they had access to it just yet. But eventually it will be. So it’s interesting to consider that as this knowledge progresses, it would bring us back to this era of bespoke scholars dedicated to a particular prince. It’s important to remember that that never went away. Two halves of that. One, for ages it’s been true that half of the words we read every day are bespoke only for us, because they’re email. They’re letters. They’re the correspondence back and forth which has the audience of one, the addressee, and that’s the majority of what all of us read and write in our lives. It’s also always been the case that in the halls of power, there are book-long things with an audience of one or an audience of five. There are historians and other scholars and scientists whose job is to provide that 100-page report on the history of Syria, to be given to a committee of Congress, where these nine senators or these nine congresspeople need the background on what’s happening so that they can understand a current events thing. There are historian friends of mine who work for the Department of Defense Intelligence, who produce these book-length research projects with an audience of five or an audience of eight or an audience of a couple dozen, because it is the bespoke proprietary knowledge needed by the government at that moment. Sometimes it’s technological knowledge, but just as often it’s going to be historical knowledge of, “Here are the important rivers where military things are likely to happen,” says the historian who knows the history of this stuff.…

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