The Depreciation of Knowledge

The human value of knowledge is shown most glaringly in my own life through school, which I have been waking up for at 7:00am most days in my 17 years of life. So have all my friends, parents, and the generations before me. We spend our childhood learning literature, mathematics, science, history - the foundations of higher education and knowledge - because we believe the acquisition and endless pursuit of knowledge gives us power and that it propels humanity forward. We have committed ourselves to a seemingly endless marathon of innovation, achievement, and knowledge.

For the first time in our 300,000 years of existence, this has a serious possibility of changing. For the first time in history, I can ask the same technology to solve calculus, write an essay, solve the Navier-Stokes Millenium Problem, or model how a protein will react with another molecule. And these are all things that are already possible with our current AI models.

What happens when we reach Artificial Superintelligence? When knowledge of everything becomes instantaneous? It doesn’t matter whether this breakthrough occurs within the decade or longer, it still forces us to confront this uncomfortable reality.

One reason why knowledge has been immensely valuable can be shown through the Law of Scarcity. Deep knowledge in an area requires an immense amount of time and effort, meaning it is limited. However, knowledge is heavily desired, as it is necessary for our desire to innovate. We spend years aspiring to become doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs, because the knowledge necessary to get there is incredibly difficult to acquire, yet tremendously valuable.

ASI threatens this relationship. When deep knowledge becomes widely instantaneously accessible, and the ability to innovate follows that, the scarcity of knowledge begins to disappear. If ASI is able to do the cognitively demanding work that defines our lives, and eliminate the necessity of intellectual investment, the value of knowledge consequently declines. Anybody would be able to design a new therapeutic drug, invent new mathematical frameworks, or translate ancient texts.

I am not sure whether this seemingly inevitable reality is good or bad, but it does seem unnervingly nostalgic and presents an interesting paradox. We have built schools, libraries, and computers with the goal of accelerating our pursuit of knowledge. And now it seems that the accumulation of our knowledge has enabled us to build a technology that makes the very thing we sought instantaneous.

Our pursuit of knowledge may have resulted in making knowledge itself less valuable. But I think the strangest part is that we haven’t ended our chase for knowledge - we may have just passed it on to a new entity: AI.