New Post from BiteofanApple
Drawing Boxes vs. Shading Them In
There are two primary kinds of human endeavor: drawing boxes and shading them in. The first defines the boundaries of behavior, culture, and discussion; it draws the boxes. The latter implements those definitions and works within those boundaries. In other words, it shades them in.
I think these two definitions can help us grapple with a lot of the current debate around the role of humans and A.I. going forward. To see how, let's first explore what I mean by shading in via some historical analogues.
Shading In
For simplicity, let's pick a story most people might be familiar with: classical physics. The broad story goes thus:
At first no one really knew why or how things moved. Aristotle had some ideas, they weren't all that useful.
Then Isaac Newton (and Godfried Liebnitz) discovered calculus and Newton coined his so called Laws of Motion. Together those two ideas set modern physics, well, into motion.
The next two centuries spawned innovators who built on Newton, abstracted his math, and applied his principles to a huge range of problems.
In this way people like Euler, Lagrange, and Maxwell built on Newton's ideas, expanding them, formalizing them, and using them to build telegraphs, and rockets, and space probes, and eventually the Internet. This is of course an over-simplification, but let's go with it.
In this formulation, Newton didn't simply take another step along the road. He defined the very foundation of a new discipline. After that countless physicists and engineers filled in the gaps by plugging holes in the theory and applying its principles to the real world. This is where the real advancement happens.
Obviously though, this change didn't happen immediately. This is because shading in takes time. It's limited by the knowledge of people in a given place and their ability to find occasion to use a new piece of tech. Of course, as all software devs learn, the actual process of building takes time too.
In this way, we can see that innovation broadly defined propagates as a wave from some source. The speed of that wave depends on three factors:
knowledge transmission + application discovery + implementation
As another example, think of the digital revolution. Once the World Wide Web became available to the public, it took time to build out the physical infrastructure. Then it took time to discover new techniques for building in this new world and find places where these technologies could or should be used. Finally, it took time (and a lot of money) to actually build those things we'd decided were useful.
Automations of that last step are always good. Assembly lines not only standardized output, they dramatically cut the time it took for cars to go from a drawing to a product in people's driveways. LLMs for coding and math are basically the same thing.
There has always been a huge demand for software, evidenced by its high cost and near constant growth. The world has continued to find new places to use computers and software to solve our problems and improve our lived reality. The wave of innovation created by the emergence of the personal computer and the World Wide Web has shaded in the boxes drawn by the invention of those technologies. What we're seeing now is the dramatic speed up of that innovation which is no longer so limited by the speed of implementation.
0 comments