Joseph Henrich

So it's the throwing model.

Yeah.

So if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you focus your efforts on learning how to code or whatever.

Yeah.

And so that means that's where you're likely to make the innovation.

Yeah.

So that's definitely something I've thought about and I wrote about in Secret, which is that as the rate of cultural change gets faster – and we sort of talked about this with environmental change –

The value of older and older members of the previous generation declines because the world that they grew up in and that they honed their skills to is quite different from the current world.

So you would expect the degree to which, I mean, optimally, you would look less far back or you would look to relatively younger individuals to get your inspiration from because the world they adapted to is closer to the world you're going to need to adapt to.

Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely think it's pretty interesting and holds great potential for expanding the collective brain.

There are little things in there which might make one worry.

So if you study the history of innovation, you find out that, for example, serendipitous meetings are super important.

So there's a great paper on Silicon Valley showing that companies will cross-reference each other's patents more likely when the people at those companies tend to frequent the same coffee shops and they track people on their cell phones and stuff to figure this out.

So serendipitous meetings are important and improper copying.

So a huge number of innovations are mistakes where somebody copied incorrectly and then got something better.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think that's a very interesting area of research, and it makes good sense to me.

I'm not sure of the current state of the evidence, but different parts of the genome are more or less susceptible to mutation, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah, although I haven't totally seen.

I see there's various potentials, and I'm particularly interested in using AIs to augment problem-solving in human groups.