This post was mostly written by a computer scientist/physicist friend of mine, Ken Ritley, and his favorite AI. It took me all of two minutes to sprinkle about my contribution to Ken’s dialog with a machine. Judge for yourself which of its three authors speaks to you.
I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 Space Odyssey
Since December, I’ve been working with a team at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to improve the customer experience of navigating their 20,000-document website.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of writing out the answers to all frequently asked questions we could just feed all those docs to an AI and let users ask it whatever they wanted?”
It’s been an insightful project and progress has been rapid. The main challenge, like the one that led AI Magazine in the late 1980’s to announce “The Second Coming of the AI Winter,” is not how to match questions with answers so much as teaching the computer sufficient manners to keep their listeners from wandering off to converse with friendlier gadgets like parking meters and microwave ovens.
Ken Ritley, Professor of Computer Science at Berner Fachhochschule BFH in Switzlernad, recently invited me to collaborate with him on a topic of my choosing. I told him I had been putting off writing something about Economies of Order, included a few words about what that meant, and how I could use a thinking partner to help bring it to life. A quicker study than I, Ken immediately sought the opinion of ChatGPT 4.
KEN:
A friend of mine was thinking about a comparison between economies of scale and the next wave of economies that he calls “economies of order.” Much has been written about how the industrial revolution was first fueled by interchangeable parts but more fully through the relationship between cost of goods and their production at scale. But what about the economies that come when we use those goods in more cleverly architected ways. Do you have any ideas about this?
Ken’s new thinking partner shot back an instant summary.
CHATGPT4:
It sounds like your friend is referring to a concept that could be related to the idea of “economies of scope” and “economies of network.” These ideas go beyond the traditional concept of economies of scale, which focuses on cost advantages gained by producing a larger volume of goods…
Your friend’s idea of “economies of order” could [focus] on creating value through the strategic organization and integration of various resources and capabilities. This could involve the clever use of existing goods and technologies in innovative ways, or the development of new business models that take advantage of emerging opportunities.
Some examples of this “economies of order” concept could include:
- Platform-based businesses: Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon…
- Industrial symbiosis: This concept involves the collaboration of multiple industries to optimize the use of resources and minimize waste…
- Smart cities: The integration of digital technology and data analytics into urban planning and management…
Ken is pleased with what he’s hearing.
KEN: That is a brilliant connection of ideas. I like your 3 examples. Do any more examples readily appear to you, without you having to stretch?
And the bot goes on:
CHATGPT4:
Certainly! Here are a few more examples of the “economies of order” concept that can be readily observed:
- Circular economy…
- Collaborative consumption…
- Digital transformation…
- 3D printing and additive manufacturing…
- Integration of renewable energy…
These examples illustrate the potential of the “economies of order” concept to drive innovation, increase efficiency, and create value across a wide range of industries and applications.
So, there it is.
My original idea, not so original it wold now seem, is off to the races. But which horse and rider will take it to the finish line? Ken and I? Or the soul of the newest machine.
So, here’s my question to you. (I don’t plan to ask this of a ChatGPT 4 but Ken probably will.) Do Ken and I bother to write our own paper?
Dr. Ritley knows better than most that the standard for earning a PhD in any subject is the introduction of net-new insight into that subject’s public body of knowledge. But whose insights are we talking about? The questions mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing asked in the 1950s1, science fiction writer Arthur Clarke asked in the 1960s2, and mathematical physicist and Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose asked in the 1990s3 are, respectively, still being debated: Can a difference engine confer with a blind human being in such a way that the human cannot detect the machine’s inanimate state? Can a software program lift itself up by its own bootstraps, making leaps of logic that cannot be accounted for by the structure of its underlying code? When the machine is one day able to leap beyond the limitations we build into it, will the machine itself actually know what it has done?*
A more pressing question for me is whether in collaborating to write a paper on Economies of Order–or any subject for that matter–Ken and Scott will discover insights that are novel even to machines? And if so obscure that even an AI won’t have already found them out, of what use might they be to the rest of us?
***
NOTES:
- Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (paper), 1950
- Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel), 1968
- Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics, 1989