This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… How Many Magics to Human Prosperity & Progress?Call off the cults and the funerals. “AI”’s real advance is high‑dimensional prediction that generalizes without interpretable laws. That’s operational power, not Turing-Class cognition. Noah Smith...
Call off the cults and the funerals. “AI”’s real advance is high‑dimensional prediction that generalizes without interpretable laws. That’s operational power, not Turing-Class cognition. Noah Smith says: Think of three magics: literate historical memory made knowledge accumulative; hypothesis-and-experiment science made it generalizable; AI makes it operational at scale via learning‑and‑search replacing inadequate low-dimensional cookie‑cutter models with extremely high-dimension extremely big-data extremely flexible-function prediction. But is that “Third Magic” really of the same scale as the first two? I would view things somewhat differently: I would add eyes-thumbs-brains-tools, language, and societal coördination via scaled-up gift exchange to writing and science as decisive magics. And I would say that at the moment “AI” is as likely to be a wishful mnemonic as a genuine Sixth Magic. Chatbots are useful, but they’re pass‑the‑story engines: blurry‑JPEG‑of‑the‑web plus rotoscoping, not minds. The hype machines—Downer, Boomer, Doomer—confuse cultural technology with cognition and policy with prophecy. The Downer critique underrates genuine capabilities; the Boomer gospel overstates sparks‑of‑AGI. The Doomer rapture is theology in tech drag. The economic story is a bubble build‑out: GPUs gush profit; most applications burn cash. Economically, chips win, most deployments don’t; fear of disruption fuels spending by platform monopolists remembering the fates of IBM and WIntel. Use AI where feedback is tight and stakes local; demand theory or rigorous trials where failure is catastrophic; measure, pre‑register, and watch the stages of the roll-out carefully to gauge what all this will really mean for us...Noah Smith reposts <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-third-magic-23f>  , with further thoughts, his “Third Magic” essay <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-third-magic> from year-end 2022, which at the time I said was smarter than anything I had read on the internet in 2022. Here’s why I said that, and what I said back then: This by Noah Smith May Well Be Better than Anything I Read in All 2022:
But I would say not “three magics” but five—and maybe six:
What do I think? I think five or maybe six magics:
Those five magics have brought us where we are today. Now how likely is it that we are now at the cusp of a sixth magic? It would be: Predictive accuracy, generalization, and control without any simple intermediating laws, abstractions, or encapsulations that vastly exceeds any individual human grasp, or even the grasp of all humans working together. Perhaps. But I need to explain what is going on. Predictive accuracy, generalization, and control based simply on the fact that we have a huge amount of data, plus enough computer power to allow us to conduct extremely high-dimensional analysis using extremely flexible functional forms. Thus we can classify situations very finely by looking at what the situations’ nearby neighbors—for the right meaning of “nearby” which we can now figure out—are? On the one hand, I feel that this must be true—I find it very hard to imagine what our brains, or, say, a dogs’ brains, are doing in wetware other than this. On the other hand, our computers are still a lot less sophisticated than our brains. It is unclear if Moore’s Law will get us to computers of sufficient complexity. It is unclear if we can do as good a job of programming our computers as evolution has done at programming us. And, of course, we already have the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence that is all of us humans thinking together. Adding-in the new capabilities of silicon to our current ASI makes it vastly more capable. But is it enough to qualify as a genuine Sixth Magic? Perhaps. But, at least as I see it, magics one through five—eyes, hands, brains, and tools; ears, mouths, and language; writing; coördination at scale via gift-exchange amped up by money; and science—were all genuinely world-changing in a way that this latest is not yet proven to be. However, it is now nearly three years later along this ride. What have we learned, and how do things now look different? Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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How Many Magics to Human Prosperity & Progress?
Sunday, 5 October 2025
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