Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
A tech writer argues that regulatory and political bottlenecks, rather than a lack of AI intelligence, are the primary obstacles to progress in fields like medicine and housing. The piece reflects on a conversation with an AI lab employee who believes AGI will eventually bypass these human-made constraints.
Why it matters
It challenges the prevailing Silicon Valley narrative that AI will solve complex societal problems through sheer computational power alone.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying everyone or even a majority of people in the SF tech scene think this way. But some certainly do (e.g. the opening conversation is verbatim) and this post is about a particular core scene whose views carry disproportionate weight in the discourse and in policymaking.
At a recent dinner, someone from an AI lab asked me, quite bluntly , why I do what I do — why I write about the regulatory bottlenecks to medical progress, why I spend my time on policies related to clinical trials. He looked at me with something best summarized as pity.
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