One of the most missed pieces of AI is that it has raised the floor of what humans are capable of. It hasn’t so much changed where the ceiling is at.

If you want to look at it differently, within the world of LLMs, no new knowledge has been generated. We haven’t yet gone to chatGPT and been able to say “create X that is 1,000 times better than any human.”

What we have done is sort of said “The high bar for a human to accomplish this is here. Can you make it so everyone that uses AI can reach this bar.”
 We haven’t done this across all domains. But I think this is still a very meaningful shift. Yet it has much differently implications for what it means to deal with an AI future than is generally talked about.

What I think it means is that we humans will actually be able to spend more time thinking about how we increase the ceiling. Something humans are uniquely good at. And we can spend less time worrying about compensating for having a low “floor” elsewhere.

Like take this very tactically. Let’s say you have some really interesting, out there, ideas for how you can grow crops better. You’re pretty sure that by adding something very specifically to the soil you could 10x yields at the same level of nutrition or higher. Just go with me, let’s say you know how to do this. 
 Many of us have ideas like this. Things we want to explore.

Yet we run into this roadblock. This issue that we don’t know how to actually go about getting this done. It sounds silly and you’ll hear all sorts of stuff criticizing low or high agency people.

The people who come up with the most new novel ideas that I know, which often work really really well are actually some of the people who have the most difficulty in going out and actually getting stuff done. In bringing it to reality.

They’re two different skills and pretending like they’re not won’t help.

If you recognize this, that they’re two different skills, then what AI means is that the skill of actually navigating this maze of where you are to getting something done becomes a lot easier. Some of it is navigating all sorts of bureaucracy and all that but a much bigger part is just like “how do I get ahold of this thing to give to plants” and “I have this idea but it comes from this completely unrelated field where it works very well and because of that I have no idea how to actually grow a plant in the first place.”

So by having the floor raised for everyone, we’re now making it so we can have more productive and valuable divergent thinking.

We’ve heard it’s the era of the “idea guy” but I think we’re selling that short. It’s far more than that. It’s turning the idea guy into a high agency person who can accomplish things they never could have, at the level at or above everyone else.