3min chapter

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Billy Oppenheimer — On Curiosity, Creativity & Conceptual Ancestors (EP.158)

Infinite Loops

CHAPTER

The Importance of Curiosity

I think one of the things Ryan's really good at is the gems he pulls out of books that he reads. We've had tons of people try this trial task to potentially do some research with us. And the things they come back with just are not interesting or they don't have that eye for what will be interesting to others. I feel like Morgan is when he's reading and he comes across a story that he Pulls out of a book that hundreds, maybe even thousands of other people have read but didn't see on it. There's like an eye for what'll be interesting to them; how do you develop it? You need to be incredibly curious - Green Brown says curiosity is

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Speaker 2
Well, I also think about Seth Godin has written about taste and he uses the example of if you wear a tuxedo to a black tie wedding, you had good taste. But if you wear a tuxedo to the beach, you had bad taste. So it's the idea of perfection. I often think if when people post on Twitter about how AI made this great image, I think by who's opinion, who's judging it.
Speaker 1
I would add, did AI make it or did the person working with AI make it?
Speaker 2
You prompted it to do what it made. That is the
Speaker 1
art. Exactly. I completely agree. It's the human operating AI is a tool. That's what it is. It's a great fucking tool and a very powerful tool, but it is a tool. We human beings are tool makers. We always have been. There is no steel in nature. Steel came out of the minds of a human. Everything surrounding us right now came out of our minds. Humulative cultural evolution. Yay. Because everything that defines the world around us right now came out of basically the human mind.
Speaker 2
Have you seen the Steve Jobs thing about the bicycle of the mind? Yes. I first came across that a few months ago and I thought this is the greatest analogy for AI that I've come
Speaker 1
across. Completely agree. It is a very powerful tool. But it's a tool. It's like fire. I love the George Carlin thing where he says, I'm often really curious about the person who came up with the flamethrower. That's because he says that person is like thinking, you know, I'd really like to burn those people over there to death, but I'm not close enough to him. But the point is, fire is incredibly useful, but it can also be used to burn villages down and burn people. So we didn't say, no, we can't have fire. We invented fire departments, fire alarms, fire extinguisher, fire exits. We're going to do the same thing with AI. It's like the tech itself is neutral. It's the one utilizing that tech who's going to use it for good or ill, in my opinion, was back to humans.

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