Nat Friedman: prediction

Transcript context

…Here's another one and this is under the EMH section. In many cases, it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion. Now here's my question, what are the 8 billion minus 500 people doing? Why are there only 500 people? I don't know exactly. It's a good question. I ask people that a lot. The more I've done in life, the more I've been mystified by this – Oh, somebody must be doing X. And then you hear there's a few people doing X, then you look into it, they're not actually doing X. They're doing kind of some version of it that's not that. All the best moments in life occur when you find something that to you is totally obvious that clearly somebody must be doing, but no one is doing. Mark Zuckerberg says this about founding Facebook. Surely the big companies will eventually do this and create this social and identity layer on the internet. Microsoft will do this. But no, none of them were. And he did it. So what are they doing? I think the first thing is that many people throughout the world are optimizing local conditions. They're working in their town, their community, they're doing something there so the set of people that are kind of thinking about kind of global conditions is just naturally narrowed by the structure of the economy. That's number one. I think number two is, most people really are quite mimetic. We all are, including me. We get a lot of ideas from other people. Our ideas are not our own. We kind of got them from somebody else. It's kind of copy paste. You have to work really hard not to do that and to be decorrelated. And I think this is even more true today because of the internet. I don't know if Albert Einstein, as a patent clerk, wouldn't he have just been on Twitter just getting the same ideas as everybody else? What do you have as decorrelated ideas? I think the internet has correlated us more. The exception would be really disagreeable people who are just naturally disagreeable. So I think the future belongs to the autists in some sense because they don't care what other people think as much. Those of us on the spectrum in any sense are in that category. Then we have this belief that the world's efficient and it isn't and that's part of it. The other thing is that the world is so fractal and so interesting. Herculaneum papyri, right? It is this corner of the world that I find totally fascinating but I don't have any anticipation that eight billion people should be thinking about that. That should be a priority for everyone. Okay, here's another one. Large scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear. And here's my question, does that make you think that the impact of AI tools like co-pilot will be bigger or smaller because one way to look at co-pilot is it’s IQ is probably less than the average engineer, so maybe it'll have less impact.…

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