Second, I think you're missing some important bits of the AI story.
1. Go look at Ethan Mollick's recent experiments (https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-strange). Lots of niche or local journalism could benefit from more quantitative analysis in a way that isn't financially feasible if you have to hire a data scientist. Lots of journalism could also benefit from better display of its quantitative results (Tufte, etc). Seems like AI is ready to do both, more or less today!
2. Progress-utility isn't only about the leading edge, it's also (at least as much) about catch-up growth: poor countries becoming middle-income, boring industries adopting computers, software verticals moving to the cloud, etcetc. The audience for work aiming at this is, nearly by definition, not at the upper end of the literacy curve. As you note, such lower-literacy audiences are not very good at pulling in context from other work, transferring knowledge between domains, etc. AI is really good at tasks like (literal) language translation, providing context, transferring commonplaces into the argot of a different industry or place, etc. These are also extremely progress-useful things to do!
First, I agree very strongly with the first part, but it's interesting to think of historical examples where this has gone better. It seems like journalism really did improve between Hearst's day and the 90's NYT, whatever its flaws. How, and why, if not the bundling theory favored by Yglesias et al?
Another case study would be the transition between Abbe Migne's publishing machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Paul_Migne) which supplied new academic libraries all over the world with subscriptions to horrifically edited and sometimes outright forged texts and the modern university presses, which again whatever their flaws seem to do much better. Migne was already a bundler, so that can't be the issue there.
In these two cases is it that literacy just genuinely went up, perhaps because of public education in the former case and accreditation of tertiary education in the latter? If so that seems really important to achieve!
Second, I think you're missing some important bits of the AI story.
1. Go look at Ethan Mollick's recent experiments (https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-strange). Lots of niche or local journalism could benefit from more quantitative analysis in a way that isn't financially feasible if you have to hire a data scientist. Lots of journalism could also benefit from better display of its quantitative results (Tufte, etc). Seems like AI is ready to do both, more or less today!
2. Progress-utility isn't only about the leading edge, it's also (at least as much) about catch-up growth: poor countries becoming middle-income, boring industries adopting computers, software verticals moving to the cloud, etcetc. The audience for work aiming at this is, nearly by definition, not at the upper end of the literacy curve. As you note, such lower-literacy audiences are not very good at pulling in context from other work, transferring knowledge between domains, etc. AI is really good at tasks like (literal) language translation, providing context, transferring commonplaces into the argot of a different industry or place, etc. These are also extremely progress-useful things to do!
First, I agree very strongly with the first part, but it's interesting to think of historical examples where this has gone better. It seems like journalism really did improve between Hearst's day and the 90's NYT, whatever its flaws. How, and why, if not the bundling theory favored by Yglesias et al?
Another case study would be the transition between Abbe Migne's publishing machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Paul_Migne) which supplied new academic libraries all over the world with subscriptions to horrifically edited and sometimes outright forged texts and the modern university presses, which again whatever their flaws seem to do much better. Migne was already a bundler, so that can't be the issue there.
In these two cases is it that literacy just genuinely went up, perhaps because of public education in the former case and accreditation of tertiary education in the latter? If so that seems really important to achieve!
7th footnote is great!
Good essay.
Nit: "an arms race pitting John Henry and his axe against the team with the steam-powered drill" should be a hammer— not an axe.