Predicting the Future

This week, Block, Jack Dorsey's financial services company, cut nearly half its workforce. Over 4,000 people. The stock surged 20 percent on the news.

Dorsey's letter to shareholders was blunt. "Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better." He was making a prediction that most companies will reach the same conclusion within a year.

Every previous wave of automation replaced physical effort. The steam engine replaced muscle. The tractor replaced the farmhand. The assembly line replaced the craftsman. Each time, the thinking jobs were safe. This wave is different. It targets the work we went to school for. And it may force us to redefine what we mean when we call someone smart.

The truth is we’ve never had one definition. Intelligence is an umbrella term for a loose set of advantages that come with tradeoffs. Someone can be wildly creative and mediocre with words. Brilliant with numbers and blind to people. Great at inventing, useless at maintaining.

So we fall back on outcomes. We watch who wins.

But visible success is a noisy signal. Someone buys a modest house in the right city in 1987 and looks like a financial genius for forty years. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime. Mendel’s genetics sat ignored for decades. Were they unintelligent, or was the world just slow?

So we reach for other definitions. IQ. Net worth. Job performance. Reproductive success. Freedom. But they can contradict each other. Someone can score 145 on an IQ test and die broke. Someone can build a billion-dollar company and leave nothing worth remembering. Someone can have 10 kids but be on welfare. Another can have no kids and total freedom. Sometimes the metrics clash with each other.

The Beehive

There’s another problem with judging who’s intelligent. We confuse roles for capacity.

Most of our definitions of smart assume the unit of intelligence is the individual. But humans didn’t conquer the planet through solo genius. We did it through collective intelligencem storing knowledge outside our brains, dividing labor, and transmitting culture across generations.

@codywrites

Source: The Secret of Our Success By Joseph Henrich #greenscreen #history

A beehive is an example of this. A few scouts range out and fail repeatedly until one finds flowers and signals the location. Most bees stay back feeding larvae, building comb, regulating temperature. The hive needs both. Too many scouts and it starves. Too many maintainers and it can't find new food. The scout isn't smarter than the nurse bee. They're executing different roles inside a system that is itself the intelligent unit. Strip out either type and the whole thing collapses.

@robertcollins486

Some scout bees checking out the swarm trap.#bees #beekeeping #swarm

Human societies run the same way. We need explorers who take risks and occasionally open new routes or technologies. We need maintainers who keep the infrastructure functioning and carry forward what's been learned. Calling one smarter than the other mistakes the role for the capacity. It's like calling the load-bearing wall more important than the foundation.

The hive needs both the scout and the maintainer to survive.

India and Nigeria produce extraordinary people, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, and they also export a large share of them. when a society’s maintainer layer, its laws, culture, people, and infrastructure fails, the scouts leave. This is the reality of brain drain in places like India or Nigeria. These countries produce world-class talent, but talent requires a functional hive to absorb it.

A scout bee without a functioning hive doesn’t make the hive smarter.

Predicting the Future

Sometimes the question can be useful. Practically.

If you want to get to know someone, ask them who they think is smart. It works while on a date. In a job interview. At a dinner party.

Their answer won’t tell you much about intelligence. It will tell you about them, what they respect, what they envy, what they think the whole game is for. It’s more revealing than almost any question you can ask directly, because they won’t feel like they’re being analyzed.

Its Wittgensteins Ruler. it doesn’t measure the thing. It reveals the person holding the ruler.

It’s no surprise Elon Musk thinks intelligence means predicting the future. He built his fortune by betting on futuristic technologies. Of course he’d define smart that way.

The problem is that the future is not yours to know. The future is genuinely unknowable, and the ancients had a word for thinking otherwise. Hubris.

Herodotus writes about the story of Croesus.

Croesus was the king of Lydia in the sixth century BC. Fabulously wealthy, militarily powerful, favored by the gods. By every measure available, the most successful man alive.

Solon visited him at the height of it. Solon was the great Athenian lawgiver, the wisest man in the Greek world. Croesus showed him the treasury, the armies, the palaces and asked who the happiest man in the world was, fully expecting to hear his own name.

Solon told him you cannot call any man happy until he is dead.

Croesus sent him away as a fool.

Then Croesus’ son was killed in a hunting accident. Then Cyrus the Great of Persia began swallowing kingdoms westward. Croesus consulted the Oracle at Delphi about whether to attack. The Oracle told him that if he crossed the Halys river, a great empire would be destroyed. He heard what he wanted to hear. He crossed.

He destroyed an empire. His own.

His army crushed. His capital fallen. His treasury taken. Standing on the pyre, sentenced to be burned alive, he finally understood what Solon meant. You cannot know how a life turns out until it is over.

Croesus died from a hunger for certainty. He went to Delphi to make the future legible. The oracle gave him language that felt like knowledge and worked like a trap.

If you treat intelligence as predicting the future, you create a demand for certainty. And wherever there’s demand, supply shows up.

That’s how you get oracles, people and institutions selling foresight.

The Business of the Delphic Oracles

If predicting the future is a bad business, because the future is unknowable, how did Delphi stay in business for centuries?

We tend to picture the Oracle as mysticism. Incense, trances, priestesses, riddles. But it was also an institution with customers, incentives, and a product. And it was remarkably durable.

The Oracle had a brutal problem. If you're wrong, you're finished. Kings stop coming. Cities stop sending delegations. No upside from being right, massive downside from being wrong. That asymmetry shaped everything. So she did the only rational thing available to an institution operating under genuine uncertainty.

Stay ambiguous. Let the petitioner do the work of interpretation. Let them supply the confidence.

The classic is Themistocles and the "wooden walls" prophecy. Athens asked the Oracle how to defeat the Persian invasion. She said Greece would be saved by wooden walls. Half the city thought it meant the wooden fence around the Acropolis. Themistocles argued it meant ships. He built a fleet. The Persians were destroyed at Salamis.

Survival Over Prediction

If we want a definition of intelligence that holds across every domain, it isn't predicting the future. It is not being harmed by it.

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