What will the world look like in 10 years?

Before Google, it used to be that when you set out to solve a problem, you'd run across several more. To even begin to solve your problem or answer the question, you'd have to, to some extent, understand the domain of the problem at some level of depth. And often, this domain by itself was not sufficient or even relevant, so you needed to cast your net pretty wide. For example, to answer the question "what was the economic state of Sierra Leone in the 1940s", you might have to understand its geography, its culture, and so on to at least some extent, for context and so you'd know what other resources to look into at least. Every question was a puzzle with your unique solution. You might even end up learning quite deeply about something that you didn't set out to. Ask this question to ChatGPT and see how detailed of a writeup you'd get: and imagine having to piece something like this together with nothing but a librarian at your disposal. So I think people tended to have some broad expertise about this and that. Not to mention the second order effect of people getting to know each other through these queries. 

Physicist Richard Feynman once suggested keeping maybe three or four unsolved problems in your back pocket and revisiting them over your professional career. If you were ever lucky enough to solve them, you'd look like a genius. But it wasn't that you were necessarily a genius: you just waited until you had the necessary ingredients to solve the problem. 

I remember playing Minecraft in a very solutions-directed way. For example: I needed more food, so I built a wheat farm. To increase production, I required a ridiculous amount of iron (and doing horrible things to villagers). So I built an iron farm, which itself took a while to get right. There were other problems to solve, and I had to start mapping out dependencies and even doing math. In the midst of all this engineering, I looked over at my friends who actually seemed to be enjoying the game, finding that their chests were filled with incredible amounts of material that I didn't even know were in the game. I thought I'd been playing so efficiently -- at least by the numbers, shouldn't I be ahead?

There's the top-down approach of picking a problem and seeking out resources to solve the problem. But it turns out what my friends were doing, and arguably what we have been relegated to for much of human history, is the bottom-up approach to problem solving. What we effectively do is take inventory of our knowledge, resources, and access available to us locally and solve the problems that are easy and possible to solve within our sphere. Biologist Stuart Kauffman talks about a concept called the adjacent possible: in science, the questions we ask are limited to what we can imagine within our current scientific paradigm. To get to the other doors, we have to go through the doors available to us in this room, first. But in the bottom-up approach, we take the easiest door and try to go as far as possible, instead of bashing our heads against the stuck one. Gamers like to call this tunnel vision.

Well anyways I should write a conclusion here but that's about all I've got.