> "When intelligence is no longer scarce, effectiveness will become the next limiting factor of the development of human civilization." ### 1 | Justify it **What the claim really says** - *Intelligence* ≈ the capacity to generate accurate models, proofs, plans, designs, code, art, insights. - *Scarcity* means marginal cost ≫ marginal value; LLM-class AI and specialized solvers are driving that cost toward ~0 for most cognitive tasks. - *Effectiveness* ≈ the ability to translate good plans into real-world, durable outcomes—funding, logistics, materials, institutions, political permission, human adoption, maintenance. - Therefore, as the “thinking” part becomes abundant, the binding constraint shifts to the *doing* part. **Why it’s plausible** 2. **Economic substitution** – When a production factor becomes cheap, the shadow price of the complementary factor rises (Solow productivity accounting). Before the steam engine, horsepower was scarce; once cheap energy arrived, skilled engineers and capital networks became the bottleneck. 3. **Computational thermodynamics** – Information may be cheap, but actually *moving atoms* still costs energy (Landauer, Margolus–Levitin), coordination, and time. 4. **Organizational physics** – Institutions have a maximum throughput (March & Simon). The rate-limiting step after infinite ideation is the slowest span of *collective action*—permits, supply chains, collective trust. ### 2 | Explain it (why it’s thrilling) - **Civilizational phase shift** – We are crossing from the “Age of Discovery” (find out *what* to do) into the “Age of Deployment” (manage *how* to do it at scale). - **Entropy vs. negentropy** – Intelligence decreases informational entropy; effectiveness must decrease *physical* entropy (keep bridges from rusting, codebases from rotting). That is a deeper thermodynamic battle. - **Agency unbundling** – Separating cognition from execution lets us see human institutions as *actuators* attached to a planet-scale reasoning cloud. This reframes governance, economics, even identity. - **Moral leverage** – If good ideas proliferate freely, only capacity and values determine whether they materialize—creating unprecedented responsibility for alignment and stewardship. ### 3 | Projects & actions that flow from the insight | Domain | Project sketch | Impact lever | | --- | --- | --- | | Governance | “Effectiveness Audit” laws—cities publish real-time dashboards of policy latency from idea → street. | Turns bureaucratic opacity into a measurable KPI. | | Technology | Execution OS: APIs that bind LLM plans directly to robotics, supply-chain APIs, and smart-contract escrow. | Collapses planning–execution gap for SMEs and labs. | | Education | From STEM to STE^2M (Science-Tech-Engineering-Effectiveness-Math) curricula; studios where students must ship working systems, not just designs. | Trains “builders of builders.” | | Finance | Milestone-per-minute capital—VC funds that automatically release tranches when on-chain evidence of progress arrives. | Aligns capital velocity with build velocity. | | *Social | Community Crash-Test Centers—sandbox zones where regulations are temporarily relaxed to pilot AI-driven public-works automations. | Rapid feedback on real-world adoption friction. | ### 4 | Links & intellectual cousins | Thinker / Era | Key idea | Connection | | --- | --- | --- | | Peter Drucker (1950-2000) | “Knowledge workers’ productivity is the biggest challenge.” | Shift from raw knowledge to its effective use. | | Wang Yangming (Ming China) | Zhī xíng hé yī – “knowledge and action are one.” | Early assertion that cognition without action is incomplete. | | Aristotle | Phronesis (practical wisdom) vs. Sophia (theoretical). | After sophia is plentiful, phronesis sets the limit. | | Deming & Toyota | Continuous improvement (Kaizen). | Systematically raising execution tempo once intelligence-in-process was abundant. | | Moravec’s paradox | Hard for machines to do tasks humans find easy. | Indicates that physical-world effectiveness lags pure cognition. | | Leibniz’s “Stepped Reckoner” dream | A calculus that would end dispute (“let us compute”). | He assumed reasoning scarcity; we now confront implementation scarcity. | ### 5 | Devil’s-advocate critique 2. **Intelligence is still scarce at the frontier.** GPT-like tools generate *plausible* text, but hard scientific breakthroughs, paradigm-level creativity, and cross-domain synthesis may stay rare. 3. **Energy, not effectiveness, might be next.** If building gigascale data-centers and robotics fleets devours all clean energy, *joules* beat *effectiveness* as the limiting factor. 4. **Institutional calcification** – Human power structures resist becoming mere “actuators.” Political friction could negate any technical abundance of intelligence. 5. **Goodhart hazard** – Measuring “effectiveness” invites metric hacking; you may optimize for visible milestones while harming long-run resilience. 6. **Alignment overdose** – Hyper-effective systems that are *mis-aligned* accelerate harm (e.g., high-frequency algorithmic bioweapon design). ### 6 | Further exploration **Sharper questions** - How do we *measure* effectiveness across domains without falling into Goodhart traps? - What *thermodynamic floor* (energy, materials, time) exists for turning bits into atoms? - Could *coordination architectures* (DAOs, liquid democracy) raise societal effectiveness faster than incremental policy reforms? - At what point does *hyper-automation* erode the social fabric that legitimizes action (jobs, meaning, agency)? - Where do *values* enter? If effectiveness rises, which ethical frameworks decide which ideas get executed? **Next-step probes & experiments** 2. **Meta-benchmark** – Build an open leaderboard of idea-to-deployment latency for open-source hardware, drugs, and climate tech. 3. **Effectiveness Genome Project** – Map all friction sources (legal, logistical, cultural) inside 50 landmark projects; publish an ontology of bottlenecks. 4. **Synthetic Societies** – Use multi-agent simulations where LLMs propose and *also* enact policies in a constrained virtual economy; study emergent failure modes. 5. **Cross-discipline fusion labs** – Pair master logisticians with cutting-edge theorists for 90-day sprints; KPI is *bridges built*, *cells edited*, *tons of CO₂ removed*. 6. **Philosophical jam sessions** – Revive salons on the praxis gap; invite theologians, engineers, game designers—harvest metaphors for action. --- #### In short Once thinking becomes cheap, *doing*—in all its messy, embodied, politically-contested, entropy-laden glory—becomes the crucible of progress. Whether that yields a golden age or a brittle dystopia hinges on how inventively we tackle the *effectiveness bottleneck* right now.