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Austrian economics and AI scaling - Marginal REVOLUTION

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As many of you know, I grew up reading (on knowledge) Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Lachmann, Mario Rizzo, and others in that tradition. For these Austrian and Austrian-related thinkers, knowledge is about how different parts of a system fit together, rather than being a homegeneous metric easily expressed on a linear scale. There is no legible way to assess the smarts of any single unit in the system, taken on its own. Furthermore, there are many “walls,” meaning knowledge is bumpy and lumpy under the best of circumstances. It thus makes little sense to assert that an entity is “3x smarter” than before. In my early 20s I received a second “dose” of related ideas through complexity theory and non-linear dynamics, some of those frameworks having Hayekian roots. When people came along and made various predictions about AI following “scaling laws,” I was never extremely impressed. I did not feel I had the technical background to contradict them, I just was never sure they were measu

As many of you know, I grew up reading (on knowledge) Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Lachmann, Mario Rizzo, and others in that tradition. For these Austrian and Austrian-related thinkers, knowledge is about how different parts of a system fit together, rather than being a homegeneous metric easily expressed on a linear scale. There is no legible way to assess the smarts of any single unit in the system, taken on its own. Furthermore, there are many “walls,” meaning knowledge is bumpy and lumpy under the best of circumstances. It thus makes little sense to assert that an entity is &

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