Well… first of all, the notion that “ideas are generated by combining other ideas N at a time” is not exactly an amazing AI theory; it is an economist looking at, essentially, the whole problem of AI, and trying to solve it in 5 seconds or less. It’s not as if any experiment was performed to actually watch ideas recombining. Try to build an AI around this theory and you will find out in very short order how useless it is as an account of where ideas come from...
But more importantly, if the only proposition you actually use in your theory is that there are more ideas than people to exploit them, then this is the only proposition that can even be partially verified by testing your theory.
This is a good idea though. Why doesn’t someone combine economics and AI theory? You could build one of those agent-based computer simulations where each agent is an entrepreneur searching the (greatly simplified) space of possible products and trading the results with other agents. Then you could tweak parameters of one of the agents’ intelligences and see what sort of circumstances lead to explosive growth and what ones lead to flatlining.
Well… first of all, the notion that “ideas are generated by combining other ideas N at a time” is not exactly an amazing AI theory; it is an economist looking at, essentially, the whole problem of AI, and trying to solve it in 5 seconds or less. It’s not as if any experiment was performed to actually watch ideas recombining. Try to build an AI around this theory and you will find out in very short order how useless it is as an account of where ideas come from...
But more importantly, if the only proposition you actually use in your theory is that there are more ideas than people to exploit them, then this is the only proposition that can even be partially verified by testing your theory.
This is a good idea though. Why doesn’t someone combine economics and AI theory? You could build one of those agent-based computer simulations where each agent is an entrepreneur searching the (greatly simplified) space of possible products and trading the results with other agents. Then you could tweak parameters of one of the agents’ intelligences and see what sort of circumstances lead to explosive growth and what ones lead to flatlining.