What LLMs teach us about intelligence

Dan, in many ways, it seems that, in this article and your previous "Five New Thinking Styles for Working with Thinking Machines", you are channeling physicist Prof. David Deutsch's books "The Fabric of Reality" (1997) and, especially, "The Beginning of Infinity" (2011), wherein he asserts (these quotations from his 2009 TED Talk): "The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress." and "That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world." His core view is that better and hard-to-vary explanations lie at the core of humanity's progress, especially since the Enlightenment. Your discussion herein (e.g., that "This mindset shift from control to participation, from certainty to possibility, opens up new ways of thinking and problem solving. It allows us to navigate complexity with greater resilience and adaptability, recognizing that our greatest breakthroughs often come when we're willing to dance with the unknown.") seems fully resonant with Deutsch's worldview. Yet in your "Five New Thinking Styles...", you observe that "The search for rules and essences, the obsession with process and sculpting, is ultimately a search for explanations. Explanations are the holy grail of the West—they are what we search for in science, business, and life." Exactly as per Deutsch. Yet, extending these ideas: "The pursuit of predictions over explanations turns problems of science into problems of engineering. The question becomes not, 'What is it?' but instead, 'How do I build something that predicts it?' The shift from science to engineering will be the biggest boost to progress in this century. It will move us beyond Enlightenment rationalism into totally new ways of seeing the world—and ourselves." Exactly. Which is why the coming AI revolution -- we're just at its brink -- will be the single-most radical, evolutionary and disruptive world-shaking change in which we'll be privileged (or doomed) to participate. "May we live in interesting times..." will be an understatement. Many thanks.