Ask HN: Is lack of human imagination now the bottleneck instead of intelligence?

Why does change the world have to be an obligation? Lot of intelligent people I know are interested in other things.

If you think AI is smarter than humans at "almost everything"...well, it might just be you.

On a side note, I really feel bad for Gen Z. Society has forced them to push AI as far as possible. They probably are the most aware of its limitations. Yet they are also the least able to criticize it without career repercussions.

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Personally, I don't think so. The so-call human imagination is not always good and fantastic. The criteria of GOOD is very subjective. In most cases, some people don't know before the art shows. There are also some blind test about picking out AI-generated video and crafted one. No evidence tells the difference. The worse part is AI is improved sooner and sooner while human beings not. I believe many will say they have no self-consciousness. What they generated are blind. But doesn't really make sense if human cannot distinguish the source?

I think it may be capital gatekeeping more than bottlenecked intelligence. It feels like there is too large a gap between where people see and feel real problems firsthand and who can get the capital to fix it from either private or public sources

Is taking advantage related to financial gains? It is not the lack of imagination that stops people. They have to produce a product that is superior and market it and that requires capital and long term persistence. To top that off, more financial secure parties acquire patents and capital and monetize it. Zillions of people are looking for a way to capitalize on Ai and only a few get lucky.

I believe it is due to the huge inertia that is the product of human nature. AI is advancing incomprehensibly fast, people aren't.

Distrust is definitely part of it, "smarter than almost everyone" isn't quite an accurate statement (it is more widely knowledgeable for sure, but "understanding" is still under-defined sometimes).

Lack of imagination is also part of it I'm sure... looking at the silly things some people ask AI (tbh so do I though, out of curiosity) but failing to use it for what's truly important and where it can add value (this is what I try to pursue, mostly by just trying it a lot on anything, without stopping to think for myself).

If you look at the code generated by the latest and greatest models, you will still find it sloppy. So I won't say in general that models are already smarter than humans. Plus the context windows are still so small, it's like the early days of computers where 256kb of memory was a lot. These little context windows don't let the models tackle very high level of abstraction of work. You still need to babysit them.

Change the world how?

I was one of the very first users and developers of Bitcoin, April 2009 - Dec 2015. So for better or worse I did take part in something that changed the world. And here's the thing about that: you don't want lots of people changing the world. The world is as it is for reasons and many of the people who attempted to change the world ended up downgrading it, if not for themselves then for at least some other people. Textbook example: the long history of utopian socialist revolutions that always ended up bathed in blood.

There are relatively few world changes nowadays that everyone would agree on. That's why the utopian pitch for AI is always the same tiny handful of ideas, like curing cancer. Beyond basics like curing the last diseases, there aren't a whole lot of changes you can make that are obviously positive because most problems faced by modern societies are purely socio-political problems. They aren't problems that yield to application of intelligence. They're all about clashes of values and people struggling to impose their will on each other.

Of the few where it seems intelligence might make a difference, there are mundane reasons why it doesn't help much. Medicine is bottlenecked on clinical trials. They have far more ideas than they can check already, so generating even more won't help. Physics is bottlenecked on particle accelerator power. Ain't no LLM going to fix that. What might help is figuring out how those ideas would work out ahead of time, but that's hard because we can't simulate the body or the universe and LLMs don't have any magical solution to that either.

So the biggest impact of AI will continue to be in software, a domain where we actually are intelligence bottlenecked. LLMs can systematically drain the swampy backlogs of a gazillion badly maintained projects and that could probably absorb all the datacenter capacity being built today, if it were cheap enough. They can let us try out new platform architectures and then rewrite all the software that sits on top. Etc etc. And yeah right now some of that is limited by our imaginations and some of it is limited by cost, speed and other things that will hopefully continue to improve post-bubble.

Is your hypothesis that the lack of human imagination is preventing individuals from taking advantage of AI? Or that 'humanity as a whole' is not using it?

Just shooting some thoughts based on it, as its kind of fun:

Several things are needed for AI to be used by everyone, including not having a Butlerian Jihad. Because it is a threat to many's present ways of working, many do avoid it intentionally or have an aversion to it.

Reasonable or not, such fears certainly prevent people from taking advantage of it.

But at a level of 'humanity', the issue is mainly due to reality being physical. It takes movement of time, energy, and matter for things to change at those levels because of the fundamental physics that powers reality.

That and Government.

The bureaucracy governments have is like matter itself: heavy, difficult to move, and sometimes a burden, slowing things down as well. It can prevent overshooting as a dampening force, but it can certainly hinder progress (looking at you, EU).

Because Markets can represent the flow of time, energy, and matter, the structures and constraints they have put in place may themselves directly redirect assets to goods that don't produce functional value (leverage). This would be like the vast majority of NFTs and crypto-casinos, and perhaps physics-doomed technologies like Star Cloud. I digress...

AI, even SI existing for different companies, may be optimal for them, but the market may easily not be. It won't allocate resources more effectively.

Streamlined coordination between multiple companies enabled by SI, maybe. (Anthropic anyone?).

But in total, I would say the bottleneck is not Human Imagination. It is:

* Matter, Physics, Energy. * Governments * Markets

No. It's reality. Real problems are the three body problems plus chaos theory

We aren't solving shit even with agi. People are so far up their asses, it's unbelievable.

We have had the ability to feed the world for 50 years, the problem is not about quantity. It's distribution and unintended quantity, wicked problems, paradoxical results and simple cellular automate.

There's so many classes of problems that have zero algorithmic basis.

I think imagination is part of it, but the bigger bottleneck is our ability to turn ideas into action

I think the bigger problem is that humans now delegate the thinking process entirely to AI which in turn makes humans less intelligent and less imaginative.

The history of computer security is instructive. The solution has been known for decades, but we're still blaming users, programmers, languages and now AI instead of our operating systems.

So, yes, collective action is going to be a huge challenge for the foreseeable future, regardless of how much AI progresses.

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