Social Cyber-Networks
How AI is changing human collaboration
The key factor that distinguishes humans from other animals is the ability to socially coordinate in massive structures through high-bandwidth information transmission (language). Without symbolic communication, there would be no religions, corporations, money, or civilizations. You’ve probably read Harari.
AI, however, is transforming our ability to communicate and coordinate symbolically, making it even more efficient:
— You no longer need to explain a complex idea to someone in detail. You can just convey it to ChatGPT in whatever form is most convenient for you and provide a rough profile of the audience. GPT will adapt your idea into a version suited to their level of understanding, using relatable metaphors and concrete examples. The result? More effective communication (achieving the goal and enabling social coordination) with fewer minutes, calories, and nerves spent.
— Writing detailed requirements for developers is becoming obsolete. This week, I had a lengthy conversation with GPT about functional requirements for a sophisticated internal tool for a fund. Initially, I planned to ask it to draft a requirements document for the developers to assess, but instead, I decided to have it generate a prompt. And — lo and behold! — on the first try, I got a perfect frontend. Yes, the developers still need to build the backend, but the task is much clearer for them now, and I can see exactly what I’ll get in the end.
— In the past, products and services had interfaces. In the future, AI agents will replace them. You won’t have separate apps for workouts, dieting, hotel bookings, or managing finances. Instead, you’ll have a single orchestrator agent that knows everything about you — your weight, height, income, habits, blood tests — and can, better than any personal assistant, create a diet plan, arrange a trip, file your tax returns, or design a morning workout plan based on how late you went to bed and what you ate. Ideally, if the cybereconomy (and not cyber-serfdom) prevails, this will all be private and encrypted.
Until Neuralink is ready to be implanted in billions of people or humanoid robots number more than 10 billion, we’ll have to settle for these changes: significant leaps in societal collaboration efficiency through personalization (i.e., outsourcing unnecessary brain cycles) enabled by AI.
