← People and their mental models
3 claims Venkatesh Rao made fit 3 mental models. Most often: Emergence, Trade-offs, Value moves to what stays scarce. Everything they said here.
When something becomes cheap and plentiful, the value moves to whatever is still rare next to it.
Their wordsOnce intelligence ceases to be scarce, its complements become more important.
Whole systems do things none of their parts do, and nobody has to design that order for it to appear.
Their wordsThe fact that the substrate is mundane does not establish that the higher-level organization is mundane. Pheromone chemistry does not make ant-colony trail formation merely a chemical spill.
Every choice gives something up, so name the cost; and check, because some trade-offs everyone assumes are not real.
Their wordsHuman control is not a free safety property. It is a capability constraint, and beyond some point the two trade directly against each other.