Cutting Open the Bird

I read a tweet recently about the attempt to dissect creativity in the pursuit of ASI. A user responded, "They are cutting open the bird to get the song."

At the core of the pursuit of ASI is the question: what does it mean to be human? All work on superintelligence ends in output, result, response to a prompt. But human experience is the process of getting the result.

I studied math as an undergraduate. It's one thing to know that the square root of 2 is irrational. That's a fact handed to us, true because we're taught it. But proving it to be true is another thing entirely. That's the process. And we live that process every day.

All that we "know" comes from lived experience. It comes from the process. And it's hard to divorce one from the other. It's hard to know something without living it.

The first semester at Rhodes College taught me that the hard way. I strolled through high school. I never studied, never worked, and never tried. Good grades just came to me. If you had asked me in high school, I would have pointed to my grades as proof of my work. But looking back, I didn't know what hard work was.

Life can be a brutal teacher, effective but brutal. I learned the lesson of hard work through experience, not education. I learned it in October of freshman year. I walked into the midterm exam of freshman Spanish with no preparation at all. The result followed, and I learned, in that moment, the need to commit my notes to memory, the need to calcify lessons into learning. And it set in.

I could have read dozens of books or picked up that lesson from hundreds of stories and sitcoms, but I didn't. The process of life taught it to me. It makes me curious how much we truly learn divorced from lived experience.

Our firm, Golden Section, is a bet that some lessons can be taught vicariously rather than viciously through lived experience. The more we do this, the more obvious it is that most lessons have to be lived. Our job is to shield companies from the dangerous ones, the lessons founders would otherwise have to walk before seeing the wisdom.

The whole world seems caught up in the pursuit of ASI. Perhaps it is the palpable sense that we can fill that God-shaped hole within us with something we create. The pursuit is cutting open the bird to find the song. It misses that output and response aren't the point of life. Experience is.

Most people would agree that there isn't a simulation for holding your newborn child. There's nothing quite like it. Or the excitement, fear, and potential wrapped up in new love. These experiences are more than the outcome. But what about knowing the square root of 2 is irrational? There's an experience of knowing it and there's the outcome. The experience of knowing it means contending with solutions to the infinite voids that blast out of our finite experience.

Life is meant to be lived and ASI can't replace that. Experience is meant to teach and ASI can't shortcut that. ASI can deepen and enrich the meaning of life. It can convert the sepia tone of struggles into something richer and deeper, something colorful. It can, like any tool, augment our experience by extending that special thing that makes us, us. But it can't replace us. We are the song.