Bright Simons writes: The social edge of intelligence

Bright Simons writes that AI remembers how we thought together. In 2023, IBM's chief executive told Bloomberg that soon some 7,800 roles might be replaced by AI. Duolingo cut a tenth of its contractor workforce in 2024. Atlassian followed. Klarna announced that its AI assistant was performing work equivalent to 700 customer-service employees and that reducing the size of its workforce to under 2000 is now its North Star. Jack Dorsey wants to hold Block's headcount flat while AI shoulders the growth.

A team in the UK asked around 300 writers to produce short fiction in the spring of 2024. Some were aided by GPT-4 and others worked alone. The researchers wanted to know which stories would be more creative. The writers with AI help produced stories that independent judges rated as more creative than those written without it. Anil R Doshi and Oliver Hauser, who published the study in Science Advances, reached for a phrase from ecology to explain this: a tragedy of the commons.

IBM has reversed course on its earlier human redundancy fantasies.