Compounding
Skills compound throughout one’s life, making it possible for your output to increase exponentially, but time stays linear. The implication of this is that what you can accomplish in a given slice of your life can go up drastically over time to the point where what you can do in one day or week or month can rival or surpass what your past self could do in a year or decade or lifetime. And the same is true of individuals relative to each other.
This explains the way a lot of things work in life that we sometimes take for granted. You can spend time on selfish goals while still advancing the more general business of society as long as you have made your time valuable enough first. This applies more generally to the whole spectrum of selfish pursuits like family life or social groups as well. The way you make your time valuable is by focusing on compounding. And since we can’t reliably predict the future, the best skills to compound are usually the general ones. That is why people often say you go to college to learn how to learn and not to learn any specific skill.
Despite the derision that has arisen naturally for higher education as a result of people not actualizing these ideas, it is the best tool we have developed as a society for compounding generalized intellectual ability. Right now, the success of this tool depends on the individuals involved. We rely on the individuals that staff the institutions to embody the spirit required for students to gain the skill of compounding skills, and they have increasingly failed to do so.
This is leading to the death of those institutions in their current incarnation and the birth of something new that is less vulnerable to our human failings. Just like a machine can be used to do math without being distracted by hunger or other human desires, we are discovering it can be asked to do more complex intellectual tasks as well. Once we successfully encode the spirit of a teacher in a machine, it will embody that spirit beyond the capability of any human.
This has certain societal implications in the near and long term. The near term implications, given that machines are not equally available, is an increasing disparity in human ability beyond the exponentials we already see. We are building an exponential within the exponential. It’s important to be aware of this and try to make sure the excess is shared in a more meaningful way than it ever has been allowed to be before.
In the long term, it reminds me of gliders in Conway’s game of life. Even if we bring along as much matter as we possibly can, eventually a piece is going to split off and go somewhere beyond what we can currently imagine. Maybe if there is no free will anyways, we don’t actually have to plan anything. We could already be the glider. In any case, even if it’s a play, we still have to play our parts.