César Hidalgo: evaluation

Transcript context

…Intelligence is about the efficient acquisition of coarse grained knowledge. And you develop this idea that knowledge is incredibly important and we've become obsessed with it. So we've been thinking, well, what does it mean to understand something? And in a way, we've developed this incredibly abstract view of knowledge, know, almost like it's a probabilistic graphical model or it's a symbolic expression or, you know, maybe Yeah. You know, maybe the types of things in in a neural network is knowledge. But this this idea that that knowledge as a quantity is really important is something that has been impressed on us. Yeah. And I think that's something that you have in common with other disciplines. In my case, I'm coming more from the perspective of economics and social psychology, in which we look at knowledge as this sort of quantity that is essential to explain economic growth and the wealth of nations. And this is something that has led to a couple of Nobel Prizes. 2018, you know, Paul Romer got the Nobel Prize for Endogenous Growth Theory. This year, you know, Aguilan and Howard also got the Nobel Prize. And the idea of Romer in particular is the 1 that is interesting and I think might be different from the way in which maybe a computer scientist thinks about knowledge, but it's the following. So when you're trying to explain economic growth, you're trying to explain output. Know, so imagine you have 10 carpenters that have access to hammers and nails and boards of wood, and they have to produce birdhouses. And these 10 carpenters produce 10 birdhouses per hour. Now, you know, let's say that you wanna produce 20 birdhouses an hour. Well, you might need to double the number of carpenters because if they're doing the same thing, you know, and you wanna do more of them, you're gonna have to have more camperatures, more nails, you know, more hammers and so forth. So that tells you that labor and capital are rival inputs, and if you wanna increase output, you don't increase output in per capita terms. The birdhouses per carpenter remain the same. Now imagine now, 1 of the carpenters figures out how to build a nail gun that embodies knowledge or figures out a technique to maybe organize the workshop differently that saves them some time and they're now producing 12 birdhouses an hour instead of 10. Well, knowledge has this property of being non rival that can be shared without being depleted. I can teach you a song but I still would know the song. If I give you a hammer, I cannot use the hammer while you are using it because it's rival. So what economists figured out in the eighties and in the nineties is that if you wanted to explain economic growth, which happens in per capita terms, the only way that you could do that is by assuming that growth was a consequence of a non rival quantity, something that could be copied without being depleted, and that was ideas or knowledge. And that became a big revolution in the nineties. In the nineties, everybody was talking about the knowledge economy and the idea that knowledge is the secret to the wealth of nations. But what my book tries to do is to bring that to the next level because in that interpretation from Romer and other people in the nineties, knowledge is still some sort of quantity that you can accumulate in a barrel. It's undifferentiated. So my book focuses a lot on the fact that knowledge has another property, which is that it is non fungible, not also non rival. of quantity that you can accumulate in a barrel. It's undifferentiated. So my book focuses a lot on the fact that knowledge has another property, which is that it is non fungible, not also non rival. And that non fungibility is the 1 that makes it interesting to study because it has all of this categorical, you know, differentiation that requires you to use a math and a set of representation that are more similar to the ones that are used in machine learning, which also deals with non fungible things like language. Words are non fungible.…

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