César Hidalgo: evaluation

Transcript context

…This non fungibility thing is fascinating. So all of us have this intuition. Right? You you hire someone and I'm a big believer that knowledge is situated. And there is this fanciful idea about knowledge that it's a completely abstract thing that you read a book and you acquire the knowledge and it can just be copied any amount of times. In fact, that's the argument that AI existential risk people make. You know, you can just copy the language model and now you've got 1000, you know, Einsteins instead of 1. What we find in practice is that it's quite difficult to exchange knowledge. Why is that? There is a tacit, an implicit idea there that knowledge is something that something can have while my view is that knowledge is a much more collective phenomenon. Okay? So and it's not something also that you can put in something like a book. In my opinion, the book doesn't have knowledge. The book is an archival record of some ideas that I was able, you know, to put together in a nice structure, But you cannot have a conversation with the book in the way that you can have a conversation with me in which I can tell you the story of Yacai or the story of Sam Slater or the story of how Sony got started based on, you know, what we're talking about and and have that dynamic response. So knowledge only can go to work when it's embodied. You cannot throw like you know a bunch of engineering manuals and cement into a gorge and expect to get a bridge because the books don't have knowledge, teams have knowledge, organizations have knowledge and all of that. Now, that diffusion of knowledge is something that is hard and that's something that we have established really well. What is interesting to me also about this field of study is that people say, well, there are no really laws in economics. But when it comes to economic geography, there are a lot of things that are very well established and that are law like. For example, the fact that knowledge diffuses more effectively at shorter distance and that short distance diffusion is explained by social networks has been established not by 1 or 2 papers, but by dozens of studies, if not maybe hundreds of studies that have verified those effects. The idea that knowledge moves more easily among related activities and that that can come from the complementarity of the inputs that are required to develop each 1 of those activities is something that also we call the principle of relatedness and that has been documented by hundreds of studies. So we do have law like behavior for the growth, diffusion, and value of knowledge that we're starting to understand. And some of that law like behavior goes into your question, which is that of why it is difficult to diffuse knowledge. Just the words in a paper or in a book, they are completely different to the actual physical embodied process. But is there a middle way? Are are you saying only the physical embodied process is a form of knowledge and understanding? Or do you think there exists any type of model or representation which we could say is a form of understanding?…

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