As a product manager I have found people's understanding of what they want to be tenuous at best. They know they want it to be easier, less frustrating, and do the darn thing they want. But collecting the input of all the people with the power to make choices, boiling that all down, and actually figuring out what will work is a total bottle neck. Technology and programming have hardly ever actually been a blocker. Legacy systems, conflicting requirements, and ever shifting choices represent a much harder problem.
Human Bottlenecks
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#12I completely agree with the author. As I've been saying repeatedly: AI is not magic. It's just another tool. An amazing search engine that simplifies a lot of mundane manual work to find what you're looking for. But of course, you have to have some idea of what you're looking for.
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#13"Most people are not autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something."
uhoh
i've been spotted
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#14"Most people are not autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you imagine…
We've all been there! Find something looking fun, spend a week on it then never touch again. It's normal human psychology.
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#15I've been trying to solve a lot of the issues brought up here, like personal automation, note taking, article summarizing/indexing, etc. What I've learned so far is that no level of AI-enabled automation will help me with my inherent ADD. All it means is that I have more started projects, but just as many finished ones. It has been a big enabler for things I'm already knowledgeable about, but the cognitive debt issue is real: A machine that thinks for me can't help me think better by itself.
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#16Heh, joke's on the author. I've built both a flashcard app and a notes app using AI, and I've learned more Polish in 6 months than other languages I've studied for years. Jury still out on the notes app.
But of course he's not really wrong. I've been a heavy user of Anki and a heavy reader of certain schools of academic literature on second language acquisition and knew exactly what I wanted and why and how it differed from existing tools.
The lesson I take is that you need a specific problem that you truly understand, whether it's your own problem or not.
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#17Eventually AI will be good enough that whatever is inside a human brain isn't going to matter much. It's like how the most precise craftsmanship of swiss watches didn't matter because quartz watches were far more accurate. Once a new paradigm jumps the curve, the bottleneck of the old paradigm can just be circumnavigated entirely. It wouldn't make any sense to wait for technology to improve such that gear-based watched could get 10x better, the other tech is just better by nature.
AI is just better in a fundamental way vs human intelligence. It can be reproduced infinitely, has perfect logging, no mental illnesses/hangups over certain things, far faster, able to ingest more kinds of data, etc. The only limitation now is a lack of intuitive in-context learning during test time, but once that final bottleneck falls then humans will have nothing valuable comparatively.
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#18> Could you imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something. This was a good read but this felt like a personal attack :)
Im not sure if I feel seen or accused. :)
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#19This was a fantastic article and beautifully captured something I had been circling but hadn't quite put into words: > The notetaking people—and I say this with all the love in the world—are never, like, a researcher at the cutting edge of their field, building this vast cathedral of knowledge, note-by-note, so they can derive new insights. Never a historian who has to read tens of millions of words across thousands…
> It’s always some blogger. Their “digital garden” is about how to keep a digital garden. (...) never a researcher (...) never a historian
It's quite possible that those researchers and historians do exist, but are working instead of posting about notetaking. It's like saying the people who write Python tutorials never seem to ship anything impressive, so Python must be useless.
Re: Human Bottlenecks
#20Eventually AI will be good enough that whatever is inside a human brain isn't going to matter much. It's like how the most precise craftsmanship of swiss watches didn't matter because quartz watches were far more accurate. Once a new paradigm jumps the curve, the bottleneck of the old paradigm can just be circumnavigated entirely. It wouldn't make any sense to wait for technology to improve such that gear-based watch…
I would laugh so hard if we finally were able to build real AI (not LLMs) and discovered they had all of our own flaws.