Artificial Intelligence - Created to Navigate the Information Economy

The Information Economy is unusually hard to condense. It has the potential to sprawl into gigabytes of observations, accounts, stories, mediums, and tactics — magazines and radio, billboards and pop songs, talk shows and movies, documentaries and fantasies, memes and research.

The intelligence in our heads is no longer enough to process all this. We are now manufacturing artificial intelligence to handle the sprawl — the gigabytes of noise and narrative the Information Economy produces faster than any human mind can sort.

In The Lincoln Lawyer, a character delivers the line: "Whoever controls the media controls the mind." A companion asks, "Did you just quote Stalin?" "Um," she replies. "Jim Morrison."

The exchange is funny because both answers are almost right. Stalin didn't say it, but the regime he built behaved as if he had. Morrison did say it — around 1969 — but variations were already circulating for more than a decade before he used it. In 1961, a Baptist editor named E. S. James told the Southern Baptist Convention that "those who control the media of communication will ultimately control the minds of the people." And a 1967 newspaper advertisement in Ohio declared that "our country is run by men who control our wealth; who control our news media and thus control our minds."

Just as Americans once staked claims on a continent, a host of interest groups now stake claims on attention — defining terms, controlling narratives, racing to plant their flag in your mind before someone else does. Advertising, marketing, politics, investor sentiment: in every one of them, the good things go to whoever captures your attention first.

Attention: the last zero-sum domain.

So what do we do in a world with this much information — most of it made rather than found? We make intelligence to match.

Natural intelligence evolved to navigate the natural world. Artificial intelligence is built to navigate the worlds we've built — machinery and code, social norms and institutions.

Archimedes said: give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world. Artificial intelligence is that lever — not for moving the physical world, but for moving the ones we've built inside it: the private worlds of our imaginations, the shared worlds of our institutions.