AI has created an 8th continent
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Did you hear the big news?
Scientists have found a new continent! The famed 8th Continent. Right in the middle of the Pacific. They call it LaLaMbdia:
Can you believe that? Turns out all of the planes and ships just barely missed it. We just never checked that spot on the map. How silly!
Well, we’ve found it now. The pseudonymous Twitter account Charlize Darween broke the news last week. What strange creatures did we find there? Galapagos turtles, or something else?
We’re still learning about the Lalambians, but here’s what we know thus far:
First, they have a very strong education system. Lalambdians have one of the highest test results among all developed nations. Just look at those AP and SAT scores:
Global North and Global South, watch out! The Global Center (Lalambdia) might be an economic superpower soon enough.
Second, Lalambdians have a striking work ethic. The West does 9-5, 5 days a week. China is famous for 996: 9am-9pm, 6 days a week. Lalambdians though? 24/7! They literally don’t sleep.
Third, what language do they speak? Lalambdians are best at English but are quite the polyglots:
Fourth, Lalambdians tend to lean a bit liberal. Some in the bottom left, some in the middle, and some in the top right:
All of these smart Lalambdians are starting to enter the workforce. Economists are first on the scene to understand the economic implications of this new land.
What happens when Lalambdians enter the workforce?
Economists (and technologists) are talking about this in a few ways. Lalambdians are:
Intelligence on demand
Zero marginal cost intelligence
An intelligence API
Commoditized intelligence
Intelligence as a service
They’re all getting at the same thing—intelligent Lalambdians are ready to work!
It’s a bit like when globalization allowed Western countries to offshore manufacturing, call centers, and other labor.
We’re now offshoring labor to Lalambidans instead.
As an example, let’s look at offshoring freelance labor through Upwork. Here’s how one Lalambdian, named PaLM (in blue), scored against another outsourced human worker (in orange). PaLM scored better on two-thirds of the tasks.
But unlike those pesky human workers, Lalambdians don’t sleep and always answer immediately! Very helpful.
What other kinds of tasks might we offshore to Lalambdia?
We’ll likely offshore tasks like tax prep. This is a task Lalambdians can do (it is predictable and in the world of bits) and we want them to do it (no human touch).
Some work, like talk therapy, is less likely to be offshored. Lalambdians are good it, but as the tweet below shows, we don’t want them to do it.
Other work, like doctoring or underwater welding, is less likely to be offshored. Lalambdians can barely get a visa, much less manifest as a more bodily form!
It makes this 2x2:
But this is just what we can outsource. Zero-cost intelligence from Lalambdians can also be used for collaboration.
Co-pilot not auto-pilot. Intelligence augmentation, not intelligence automation.
Bing, er, Sydney, er, ChatGPT, er, whatever—some kind of Lalambdian is helping users of Microsoft Office. I think it’s named Copilot. The phylogenetic tree shows it may even have some DNA from the father of Lalambdian itself, Clippy!
Here, Copilot is helping some “Excel incel” drive more profits:
And here, Copilot is joining a Zoom call to summarize and take notes.
Collaborative AI will supercharge knowledge workers as a whole:
Software engineers will all be 10x engineers as they outsource work to Lalambdia in addition to India.
Teachers can give personalized instruction by de-personalizing it. All 30 students can chat with a teacher from Lalambdia.
Artists become creative directors, as they try to get budding Lalambdian artists to just. draw. five. fingers. please.
By supercharging knowledge workers, Lalambdians will reduce the cost of this knowledge work.
For example, Lalambdian coders will decrease the cost of software dramatically:
Which will create a long tail of apps, automations, and the rest.
Software can (finally) eat the world.
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We’ve seen how we’ll completely offshore some labor to Lalambdians, while adding other Lalambdians as collaborators to our remote work teams. Still, what will the long-term impact of Lalambdia be?
How will the discovery of Lalambdia change humanity?
The discovery of new lands has always changed humanity.
In a historical sense, what is the discovery of Lalambdia similar to?
Let’s start with some tech examples:
Is Lalambdia similar to the creation of the first computers, which helped us store massive amounts of information? (Pictured below: Bill Gates in 1994, showing how a CD holds the same amount of data as a big stack of paper.)
Not really. Lalambdia is about zero-cost intelligence, not zero-cost information storage.
Is working with Lalambdians like the evolution of the desk? From office equipment to apps?
To some extent, yes. Just as apps like Excel created on-demand computation, Lalambdians can help us with on-demand intelligence. Lalambdia is like a very, very smart calculator.
Are Lalambdians similar to a new UX, like the Mother of All Demos in 1968?
The Mother of All Demos showed us that we could interact with computers through a mouse, not just text. Smartphones enabled us to use our hands.
Lalambdians do give us a new kind of interface for machines. We can now access all of our apps through the ChatGPT interface, which now has plugins for Instacart, Expedia, etc.
This would mean we’re “putting apps into AI”:
The chatbot may become the new user interface:
In a way, Lalambdians are like Grandma’s Tech Help on demand. Tell it what you want it to do, and “make it goddamn work already.”
“ChatGPT please tell Alexa to call my daughter to come over and help me play Pandora radio.” 😂
Are Lalambdians like the Facebook feed? Or like the Google search bar?
Lalambdians are like Facebook and Google in that we’re delegating computation/intelligence to a machine. Facebook takes all the content and only shows you the “best” (veryyyy loosely defined). Google uses PageRank to prioritize information relevant to your search. Like Lalambdians, there is some form of “intelligence” behind each of these screens.
Computation and intelligence are two sides of the same coin.
…But what about non-tech examples? I think those may be more fruitful.
Is discovering Lalambdia like the printing press?
In many ways, yes. The printing press enabled a massive explosion of content production like generative AI is enabling now. (Some experts estimate that by 2026, 90% of content will be produced by AI.)
The graph below shows how the printing press expanded the number of books. Lalambdians are doing the same thing now. Like a million monkeys with typewriters and Photoshop.
But I actually think the discovery of Lalambdia is more similar to rising literacy rates. In the last 200 years, we’ve gone from 15% literate to 85% literate:
All while going from 1 billion to 8 billion people. Plus, globalization making the world smaller.
That’s a massive amount of intelligence unlocked.
But discovering Lalambdia might be the most similar to the evolution of sapiens ourselves.
Before sapiens developed language and cultural evolution, there was one dominant kind of intelligence: genetic intelligence. Genes answered every question from “how can one fly?” (wings) to “how can one swim?” (fins).
Simpler brains had started to do some of this work, but language and cultural evolution supercharged it. Now, when sapiens came to an ocean, they could invent boats in just a few generations, while whales had to spend millions of years evolving the ability to swim.
This intelligence explosion allowed sapiens to conquer the earth and solve millions of new problems from growing corn to nuclear energy.
Lalambdians are already starting to add to the world’s knowledge, usually in combination with human copilots. They’ve beaten us at chess, solved protein folding, and many other things. If Lalmbdians were eligible for a Nobel Prize, they would’ve already won a dozen.
2005 was Peak Human. But for Lalambdians, the knowledge frontier is just beginning.
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Hoping to travel to Lalambdia over the summer! Maybe I’ll find a nice Lalambdian wife while I’m there. 😉
- Rhys
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