It can get lost amid the AI excitement that there are other shortages in this world besides brainpower. I can think of a few other scarce resources: time… money… empathy… compassion… food… water… rare earth minerals… reliable observational data…. Intelligence can help ease some of these scarcities through efficiency, technological advancements, and social engineering. But in most cases, such improvements are limited by fundamental physics, ecology, and social dynamics.
Some problems are unpredictable by their very nature and are provably unsolvable. For example, chaos theory pioneer Edward Lorenz calculated in the 1960s that it’s impossible to forecast the weather more than about 2 weeks out (due to inherent feedback loops in the atmospheric system — the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings). Modern AI models are currently improving weather forecasts, but these gains will slow as they approach that fundamental barrier.
Other complex spaces like political systems, organizational dynamics, and financial markets have similarly chaotic elements that limit the possibilities of intelligent optimization.
I’m truly excited about some of the opportunities in the AI era as well as concerned about the many changes rapidly approaching. But let’s try to not get too carried away