Hey Ben, I’m late, but have written up some thoughts here. I think you’re misinterpreting Peter on AI on point 2 > The only promising technology for avoiding stagnation is AI.
You quote the NYT interview where he says > If you don’t have A.I., wow, there’s just nothing going on.
But in my interpretation this is clearly a criticism rather than an endorsement. Here’s Peter in another interview
why is AI going to be the only technology that matters? If we say there’s only this one big technology that’s going to be developed, and it is going to dominate everything else, that’s already, in a way, conceding a version of the centralization point. So, yes, if we say that it’s all around the next generation of large language models, nothing else matters, then you’ve probably collapsed it to a small number of players. And that’s a future that I find somewhat uncomfortably centralizing, probably.
The definition of technology — in the 1960s, technology meant computers, but it also meant new medicines, and it meant spaceships and supersonic planes and the Green Revolution in agriculture. Then, at some point, technology today just means IT. Maybe we’re going to narrow it even further to AI. And it seems to be that this narrowing is a manifestation of the centralizing stagnation that we should be trying to get out of.
Hey Ben, I’m late, but have written up some thoughts here. I think you’re misinterpreting Peter on AI on point 2
> The only promising technology for avoiding stagnation is AI.
You quote the NYT interview where he says
> If you don’t have A.I., wow, there’s just nothing going on.
But in my interpretation this is clearly a criticism rather than an endorsement. Here’s Peter in another interview