Levels of indirection. Every time a human out-sources a task to a computer it creates and uses an indirection. This is not new. It is the same as referring to books instead of knowing yourself. Later you just know whom to ask for the needed information. So my idea would be to try to measure levels of indirection. For example computers don’t just do computation for computation about computation (see also Fundamental theorem of software engineering). Wikipedia is not just pages but pages referring to pages (see also Getting to Philosophy).
Note that this nicely differentiates many kinds of noise from useful information: “Random” repetitions and variants of the same cause a wide graph but no deep (though t is easy to artificially create arbitrarily deep graphs, how to solve this remains as an exercise for the reader).
A hypothesis regarding human knowledge creation could be that the number of levels of indirection added per unit of human research effort is roughly constant. And that the introduction of AI speeds this up.
Levels of indirection. Every time a human out-sources a task to a computer it creates and uses an indirection. This is not new. It is the same as referring to books instead of knowing yourself. Later you just know whom to ask for the needed information. So my idea would be to try to measure levels of indirection. For example computers don’t just do computation for computation about computation (see also Fundamental theorem of software engineering). Wikipedia is not just pages but pages referring to pages (see also Getting to Philosophy).
Note that this nicely differentiates many kinds of noise from useful information: “Random” repetitions and variants of the same cause a wide graph but no deep (though t is easy to artificially create arbitrarily deep graphs, how to solve this remains as an exercise for the reader).
A hypothesis regarding human knowledge creation could be that the number of levels of indirection added per unit of human research effort is roughly constant. And that the introduction of AI speeds this up.