An innovation theorist says AI could squeeze out the weird ideas that change the world

Innovation theorist John Nosta. Courtesy of John Nosta Innovation theorist John Nosta said AI risks squeezing out the outlier thinking behind major breakthroughs. The founder of NostaLab cited Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Pablo Picasso as outliers. "The computational dynamics of the AI push those strange outliers away," he said. AI has become good at producing polished writing, answering questions, and generating ideas in seconds. But John Nosta, an innovation theorist and founder of the think tank Nostalab, worries the technology could gradually crowd out the rare, original thinking that has historically driven humanity's biggest breakthroughs. Nosta compares human thinking to a bell curve. Most people cluster around the middle, he said, while the people responsible for the biggest breakthroughs sit at the extremes, or what he called the "tails."