The problem-selection premium
When building gets cheap, the scarce skill isn't building. It's deciding what deserves to be built.
building was the hard part. was.
trying to answer →What happens to expertise when everyone has the same models?Where does value move when intelligence becomes commoditized?
Richard Hamming used to ask scientists at Bell Labs what the most important problems in their field were, and then why they weren’t working on them. People didn’t like the question. It was a good question because working hard on the wrong problem is the most common way for smart people to waste a career.
Cheap execution makes that question sharper. If a prototype costs an afternoon, the cost of building the wrong thing is no longer the build. It is the months of attention you spend on it afterwards. Choosing the problem becomes the expensive decision.
Models are very good at optimising a problem once it’s stated. They are much weaker at noticing that the problem is framed wrong, or that there is a different market, architecture or direction nobody has written down yet.This is where I think humans still diverge from the model and from each other: not in answers, but in formulations. Finding a new problem means leaving the distribution a model learned from.
Unfinished: I can’t yet tell whether problem selection is a skill that can be trained, or mostly a by-product of having seen something others haven’t. If it’s the second, it’s another argument for having seen the animal.